“... that gives his prose its precision. These letters and the diaries are Maitland’s chief source. Michael Asher’s fine Thesiger: A Biography (1994) chiefly relied on conversations with Thesiger and those who had known him, supplemented by the published works. Now, Maitland’s painstaking use and critical correlation of the Thesiger papers allows him to ...”

“... right-wing. Both authors write of their profound respect for one of their former bosses, George K. Young. Young, who died recently, was deputy head of MI6 until he joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in 1961. One of the very few revelations in George Blake’s book is a memorandum which George ...”

“... The only other visitors we see are a couple of middle-aged ladies and a senior figure with four young people (which exactly describes them) all wearing Clockwork Orange type bowler hats and seeming, we all agree afterwards, insufficiently awed by the privilege being accorded them. Which we decidedly are not, twenty years after it was bestowed still the ...”

“... to the north and west as harmlessly or dangerously archaic margins (much as I did as a young tourist), and set out accordingly to placate or subjugate them as circumstances dictated, what lay across the seas to the south and east was another matter altogether. The border with Scotland could be legally abolished in 1707 because for the English what ...”

“... Both versions have the allusion I have just spotted to the song ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life’ by Young and Herbert (from Naughty Marietta). ‘At last I’ve found thee,’ the line continues, picking up the idea of finding pain when paradise is lost, or has lost us. ‘Mistery’ suggests missing mastery as well as what we don’t know. Another ...”

“... in the Country’, ‘The Villebon Way and the Meséglise Way’, ‘A Stay at the Seaside’, ‘Young Girls’, ‘Noble Names’ and ‘Venice’. She lists those elements that will reappear in some form in À la recherche:The grandmother in the garden, the goodnight kiss, the drama of going to bed, the walks towards Meséglise and Guermantes, the farewell ...”

“... Australian politics attracts few first-rate people. Whitlam would have made his mark anywhere. The young and hopeful responded to Whitlam as to a new messiah. But the liberal-minded middle-aged, too, were heartened by his programmes and rhetoric. Even the heartlands of conservatism were disarmed to discover that Labor had elected a leader who, as I recall one ...”

“... writes that Péguy ‘was calling for [Jaurès’s] blood: figuratively, it must be said; though a young madman, who may or may not have been oversusceptible to metaphor, almost immediately shot Jaurès through the head’. I used to wonder how figurative the call was; and I was sure the killer was not moved by a metaphor. Now I wonder about the afterlife of ...”

“... Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person lost in her later life. What did I want? Shots of Murdoch at her desk? Walking around, waiting for inspiration? No, just a feeling, on film or in criticism, that the writing, the construction of sentences and the ...”

“... and sleepy and scared, all of them at the mercy of the Reb, that seedy and greedy tyrant over the young ... There is no Chagall in my father’s Jewish boyhood: nothing floats, there is no scent of flowers in the air ...   On a winter’s day, I stood at the window of my father’s apartment and looked out at the season’s first snowfall. I thought of my ...”

“... a heavy shadow that dogs her like an obligation. In her novel Les Samouraïs (1990), her young alter ego is called ‘a bull-dozer’. We don’t have to go as far as that, even if it is said to be ‘the best of compliments’. Kristeva arrives at elegance, even brio, but only after cautious preparations, as if a plane were to need the length of ...”

“... New Poems (1908); Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). His Letters to a Young Poet (1903) have also been treasured by several generations of readers, often readers who are not otherwise much interested in modern poets. This scheme and these dates suggest a perfectionist writer, writing only sparely, much at the mercy of his ...”

“... some of Davie’s most delicate poems concern quiet and all too ordinary emotional desperations. A young woman in Iowa lacks ‘the ease of heart’ to see what she might have seen if she had not been so brutalised by poverty, and such ease does not feel like a luxury, some lightweight adjunct to a life. In another poem an English woman can’t leave the ...”

“... Where Yarmouth bloaters grew,     Selling Tom-tits five a fardin     To unhappy young Leboo! No one, however, would actually want to claim that this provocatively sported walrus was a direct source for the better-known specimen that consorts with the Carpenter. One of the curious phenomena which we can be grateful to Malcolm’s book for ...”

“... film was first shot. After Bogart and Bacall were married, Hawks, Faulkner, Bogart, Bacall and the young female scriptwriter Leigh Brackett wrote and improvised more. The result was to separate Vivian from her evil sister and create the happy marriage of Thirties screwball comedy and Forties hardboiled noir. ‘When you see the film of The Big ...”