“... 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 ...”

“... savage gueulade he told the Goncourt brothers he felt he was going to spit blood. But why then, Michael Fried asks, is Madame Bovary positively teeming with assonances, alliterations and repetitions? How is it that after the acid bath of the gueuloir the novel is ‘shot through with precisely the sorts of phonemic effects Flaubert claimed he wished to ...”

“... In my dealings with him, however, I never found him the ‘semi-housetrained polecat’ that Michael Foot once called him. Back in 1980-81, when he was a junior minister at the Department of Industry and I was covering the mysteries of the Common Market for the Financial Times, I found him an agreeable character with a wry and self-deprecating sense of ...”

“... with Conservative governments. On the other hand, there is no point in threatening with expulsion Young Socialists anxious to be as republican as their forebears. In my opinion, it ill becomes the Labour Party to persecute heretics and rebels. A Labour Party that aspires to become respectable is a Labour Party doomed to decay. That is enough about ...”

“... King’s chapel was a ‘folie de grandeur’ – the college had, he thought, been hoodwinked by Michael Jaffé, the Rubens expert – and did not suit the chapel’s interior (‘too coloured’). He said that Roger Fry had taught him all he knew about pictures – save ‘my own feelings about them’. Another meeting came about through the ...”

“... gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.’ These few lines supply the background to Michael Chabon’s novella, which begins thirty years later on the South Downs. The main character is an ‘old man’, once a famous detective, now devoted to his bees. He remains unnamed throughout, but given that he wears an Inverness cape and hunting cap, and ...”

“... workers’ control! It is clearly a stirring history and it is easy to see its appeal for the young Australian left-wing idealist. Alienated from his own country, both because of his homosexuality (then illegal in Australia) and because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, and arriving in London at the age of 19 ‘with a single suitcase’, he led a ...”

“... 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 ...”