“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and ...”

“... Apollinaire’s rhyme, though Padgett makes a brave effort: ‘And you drink this alcohol that burns like your spirit/Your spirit you drink down like spirits.’ Beckett, elsewhere so scrupulous in emulating Apollinaire’s rhymes, here contents himself with a mere assonance: ‘And you drink this alcohol burning like your life/Your life that you drink ...”

“... the 1770s, there were a hundred Campbells in Jamaica; it may be recalled that at one time Robert Burns was on the verge of joining them. Migration of ‘Scotch-Irish’ – a term coined before the end of the 17th century – to North America was ‘one of the most remarkable folk movements in history’, Calder writes; and in wars with Indians they ...”

“... a tonic, then, to pick up Art, Science and Human Progress, a volume of lectures sponsored by the Richard Bradford Trust, which was founded in 1969 ‘to explore the relationships between the methods of scientific investigation and of artistic creation in literature, the visual arts, and other art forms’. The Popperian process of conjecture and refutation ...”

“... the fact that nearly two-thirds of those who consulted the 17th-century astrological physician Richard Napier for treatment of their mopish or melancholic moods were women, one must set the observation that, as best one can judge from the admittedly defective data, men greatly outnumbered women among the inmates of 18th and early 19th-century madhouses. It ...”

“... Some were waterboarded. One was forced to drink urine. According to military medics, others had burns on their bodies.In​ The Fort Bragg Cartel, Seth Harp argues that after the capture of Saddam Hussein, JSOC under General Stanley McChrystal heavily exaggerated the threat of al-Qaida in Iraq in order to ensure a steady flow of funding and support from ...”

“... to Berryman’s younger brother. The case was muddied by the fact that there were no powder burns on the body, which a self-inflicted wound would have left. The coroner chose to ignore this anomaly and a verdict of suicide was returned. One of Smith’s sisters, however, was convinced there had been foul play, and Berryman too had Hamlet-like doubts ...”

“... he gets rave reviews from all sorts of famous people. The president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, sends Stern a note to tell him that he had read one of his lectures ‘with liveliest interest and gratitude’; McGeorge Bundy says that he thought another piece ‘uncommonly good’ and Lionel Trilling found an earlier draft of it ...”

“... are nowhere near as comfortable as GNER. I’ve never had much time for the spurious populism of Richard Branson: his jolly japes and toothy demeanour can’t disguise the fact that he is a hard-faced entrepreneur. These thoughts recur when we come back from Glasgow the next day and have to travel by bus two-thirds of the way (‘track repairs’) and with a ...”

“... all the more so in the final text from which the poet dropped those conservative martyrs Richard III and the Duke of Wellington. Paulin has described Geoffrey Hill as being ‘parasitic’ on Eliot’s imagination, but has always claimed to like the sonnet ‘Idylls of the King’ which provoked all the London Review controversy, and he reprints it ...”

“... a dilettante and in the doldrums about cracking the code of American musical success, Porter told Richard Rodgers: ‘I’ll write Jewish tunes.’ In Porter’s shift to the heavily chromatic minor key with its unmistakable Mediterranean flavour, he found a rhythmic correlative which engineered the crossover to Broadway. ‘It is surely one of the ironies of ...”

“... thing is not worth doing then it is not worth doing well. Recently I found myself being praised by Richard Ingrams for my radio quiz performances, which evinced, he said, a properly contemptuous attitude for the job. I have no such attitude, but I have no doubt that Ingrams, despite his notoriously eager availability for such assignments, has. He ...”

“... committee to examine NHS expenditure: the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way ...”

“... a bluestocking academic. The writers in contention (if only in their own minds) include Katherine Burns, a siren who can’t help using men; Sam Black, a tortured soul for whom writing is a salving agony; and Sonny, the 653rd Maharajah of Badanpur, who assumes that The Mulberry Elephant, a vast self-justificatory volume privately published in India, will ...”

“... and the London Waste Ltd plant in particular, was investigated by the television journalist Richard Watson for Newsnight. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste was guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was ...”