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“... decidedly minor role in the Great Game: Josiah Harlan, a soldier of fortune who was briefly in the service of the Afghan Emir Dost Mohammed; William Woodville Rockhill, diplomat, hunter and scholar; Brooke Dolan, the leader of an ill-conceived CIA operation in the 1940s. Americans indeed receive almost as much coverage as the Russians, which is absurd. The ...”

“... Pale Fire and Lolita, whose metafictional structures are fundamentally ironic, and work in the service of diffraction and destabilisation, the doubled ontologies of Hystopia are each, in their way, addressed to the novel’s central theme. In the slender fiction that frames the novel within the novel, Meg Allen, Eugene’s sister, appears again as the ...”

“... He then traces the change in style and tone which came as the academic profession and the public service spread their tentacles. He discusses three legal theorists who epitomised this transition – Henry Maine, Fitzjames Stephen, and A.V. Dicey; and he ends by analysing the cult of The Mill Who Never Was in the academic pantheon, and the adoption by ...”

“... majestic Edwardian canvas by his son Winston, and once in a delicate line-drawing of the 1950s, by Robert Rhodes James. But all this time, as Roy Foster’s book makes plain, another Lord Randolph has lain concealed by the conventions of portraiture. Winston, to whom his father was a divinity but also a stranger, wanted to prove that Lord Randolph possessed ...”

“... right. His ideas about literary theory, mythic recurrence or sexual politics may have done some service in the best of his novels, where they’re not altogether out of contact with narrative and the reality principle – though even there they look a bit sententious. Here they have everything else wrong with them as well. The muse Erato appears in various ...”

“... his career was to be entwined with that of General de Gaulle twenty years later. If his wartime service put him into the front rank of post-war Conservative politicians, it still remained unlikely that he would get to the very top. When Churchill bowed out – much later than anyone expected – it was obvious that Anthony Eden would succeed him and Eden ...”

“... understanding of Arabs and their way of life’. Yet a good part of de la Billière’s previous service in the Middle East had involved hunting down Arabs as an officer in the SAS. In Oman, he says, he failed to ‘eliminate’ (i.e. kill) or capture the three dissident leaders but succeeded in forcing them into exile. At Wadi Rawdah, the SAS attacked two ...”

“... Instead, I find myself returning to his bits of character description. At a Korean worship service: ‘Middle-aged men, exhausted from their 90-hour work weeks, were slumped deep into their chests, shoes off, catching precious sleep before the onslaught of prayer began.’ Eunice’s mother: ‘A great spidery web of defeat spread across her face ...”

“... Douglas, as an anthropologist for whom ‘primitive’ is often a fighting word, has performed a service by tackling the Bible where it seems most rebarbative, and by inviting us to consider whether even here it might manifest a complex intellectual project cast in a literary idiom that we have forgotten how to ...”

“... not be easy to name more recent comedians likely to win his approval. He quotes a letter from Robert Graves which, although it is about the poetry, gives an accurate representation of the way Fuller often sees his personality: ‘oppressed, stoical, humorous’, and not given to ‘chancing his arm’. There are various asides in which he speaks of a ...”

“... Robert Wistrich’s book is about the Jews of Vienna in their golden age, Steven Beller’s about the city’s culture in its golden age. You could be forgiven for thinking that these amounted to the same thing. Not all Viennese Jews were cultural heroes, and not all Viennese cultural heroes were Jews. But the overlap is impressive and in need of explanation ...”

“... The horse, as far as I can remember, never even flicked an ear. ‘Synchoregia’ was the service rendered by Greek citizens in backing theatrical productions – a temporary expedient caused by the financial distress of the Peloponnesian War. In recent times such backers are more usually referred to as ‘angels’ or ‘butter and egg men’. With ...”

“... This is the first volume of a projected three-volume ‘definitive’ biography of Robert Graves by his nephew, Richard Perceval Graves. It takes over where the author’s father, Robert’s younger brother John Graves, left off. John, who died in 1980, had been described by Robert as a ‘typically good pupil of a typically good school’ (to which he returned as teacher); he had for long contemplated the composition of a book called My Brother Robert ...”

“... be aware of the code’s existence.) The attitude of Military Intelligence and Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) personnel towards the Soviet Union seems to have been generally neutral, and sometimes hostile. Frank Kermode recalled (in an LRB review of Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread) that he knew several intelligence officers who thought it would be no bad ...”

“... New York’s Guggenheim Museum contains in an annex a covert Robert Mapplethorpe gallery, a sober exhibition space which, like the masterpieces of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become ...”