“... expected to know about. Who is Mary McCarthy writing for? Either the decidedly elderly or the very young might respond: the first because they can remember what she is talking about, if they knew those sections of American life; the second because it is a thrill to hear the sacred monster reminisce. The inbetweens can only remember with nostalgia her novels ...”

“... public reaction to the book has centred too narrowly on its slighting references to ex-colleagues. Robert Harris’s furious depiction of it (in the Independent on Sunday) as spluttering with ‘rage, malice, contempt and hatred’ is probably the extreme case. The memoirs of other premiers, Harris notes, have shown saintly restraint towards erstwhile ...”

“... vulgar utilitarians and then march off to found a rival church.’ Among the Luthers they placed Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins is the wunderkind of pre-Sixties American higher education. In fact, as Kerr foresaw, he may well be among the last of a type for a very long time. For about a hundred years, if not longer, American colleges and universities were ...”

“... Sisman is not usually taken in, least of all by unsubstantiated assertions from Taylor himself. Robert Cole’s book, The Traitor within the Gates, forms an instructive contrast. In his treatment of several episodes, Cole has placed his reliance on the authority of the autobiography. For example, he simply reiterates its hard-luck tale of how Taylor’s ...”

“... and those unwilling to look fools, widens. Lawrence Weschler’s life of the Californian artist Robert Irwin is the best description I know of why spending months deciding how to put two orange lines on an orange square, or why offering a strip of black tape round the skirting of a gallery as your contribution to an exhibition, could be ...”

“... for home use. ‘Some day this war is going to end,’ the gung-ho Colonel Kilgore played by Robert Duvall says in the film. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) later repeats the line, thinking how happy the young men travelling upriver with him will be when that day comes, and they can go home. ‘The trouble ...”

“... servants, good connections, horses, camels – and an interpreter. Many healthy, wealthy, plucky young men could have done as much. It is not surprising that he found it easier to be modest about his travels than Borrow did. Kinglake published his elegant account of his little trip nine years later, in 1844, and lived on its reputation, as ...”

“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... modern age – such is the view propagated in different guises by the French republican tradition. Robert Darnton’s objective, in this collection of essays, is to disturb the serenity of the dinner party, to bring the historian of ideas or the literary scholar down from the noble summits to the murky depths of Enlightenment. His particular concern is with ...”

“... the poem ‘says’ will be accompanied by biographical information about the author. Underneath Robert Graves’s ‘Symptoms of Love’, for instance, we learn this: ‘Scientists have recently classified love as a form of psychosis. Robert Graves knew all about this. The poet once threw himself out of a third-floor ...”

“... until at last senility takes hold. (In James’s phrase, Ford Madox Ford, himself neither young nor pretty, had the grade A crumpet ‘coming at him like kamikazes’.) Germaine Greer may say, uncontroversially, that ‘many a man who was attractive and amusing at 20 is a pompous old bore at 50,’ and Melvyn Bragg got a lot of stick for the novel he ...”

“... inaugural address as a 12-year-old schoolgirl. I was excited but anxious, aware that I was too young. It wasn’t yet time for my generation. Perhaps it would be time now. Embarrassed by my reverie and my emotion, I pull myself back to the present. Clinton is no longer speaking. At my table sit a lawyer, a real-estate broker and an architect. They are ...”

“... an absence of personal piety’. On the second, research might be possible. According to Robert Speaight’s account of Chesterton’s death, the Times printed what Belloc ‘rightly described as a “crapulous” obituary’, but there was a ‘noble tribute’ in the Observer – and it was by Belloc. Amusing stories, circulating without any ...”

“... in mind. I have two imaginary readers. One is an intelligent but ignorant 16-year-old: myself when young. The other is an intelligent but even more ignorant British civil servant, bent on improving his mind. How would these two fare with The Laws of the Game? The civil servant would, I suspect, fare very badly, if only because it might not occur to him that it ...”

“... a painting of a farmhouse in Germany with oddly shaped cows in the surrounding fields and a young bride and groom drifting through the air. We’re in the prewar Dutch East Indies and the painter is Aw’s version of Walter Spies, a German primitivist who tried to do for Bali what Gauguin did for Tahiti. His visitors are Margaret, a precocious ...”