“... in 1941, to be articled to the Johannesburg legal firm of Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman. The rest may be pretty familiar and if not, can be found in the curriculum vitae at the back of Fatima Meer’s worthy biography. 1944: membership of the ANC and marriage to Walter Sisulu’s cousin, Evelyn; 1947: secretaryship of the ANC Youth League; 1952: presidency of ...”

“... lecture, that ‘it is valuable to understand the poetry of the 17th century, in order that we may understand that of our own time and understand ourselves’ was one for which, in 1926, there was a fit audience, even though few. But how to go about understanding it in just this way – that is, with a view to understanding ourselves (scil. the mess we’d ...”

“... as nothing could be put to the vote of the Regent House (i.e. the whole body of dons) between mid-May and mid-October, one had to be pretty nippy to get a proposal brought to a vote before the year was out. Oxford took the Robbins criticisms to heart and in 1964 set up a commission of inquiry under Oliver Franks. Franks took evidence in open session and was ...”

“... pay and other benefits from work were lower.) The official American poverty line, $12,195 a year, may be adequate for keeping ‘a deer-hunting, bass-fishing, nutria-trapping, vegetable-gardening man’ and his wife and two children not unhappily alive by the Alabama River. But it’s no good in a city, and the average – which on Luttwak’s figures for all ...”

“... the vodkas, saying how pointless and infuriating it was that the better writers – whom we may as well call James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard among others – wouldn’t join in on the song. ‘It’s their loss,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do they want?’ A fairly good idea of what they wanted could be gleaned at that time from a visit to ...”

“... in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’ (D.J. Enright). We may sneakily feel it appropriate that Nabokov the mandarin spent the last two decades of his life in a hotel suite in Montreux – after all, this lofty, cold, smug, politically neutral figure is himself a kind of one-man Switzerland. The trouble with this image ...”

“... that amounts almost to a rewrite of history. Cogent though Brown’s facts and Lloyd’s rhetoric may be, both authors show a fatal eagerness to please. How odd it is that a decade of Thatcher has not taught Labourites the essential distinction between being liked and being respected. The Prime Minister has demonstrated a willingness to take life and to risk ...”

“... and his work, these essays make a very good place to start. Members of his fan-club such as myself may wish, however, that he had pressed forward with his case against his critics; these essays, acute and interesting as they are, mostly recapitulate the arguments which his books spelled out at greater length. They offer many interesting glimpses of the process ...”

“... and ‘external’ evidence. Furbank and Owens rate the latter much more highly, but this may be in part because they associate internal evidence with the dredging up of ‘favourite phrases’ allegedly used by Defoe. In extreme cases these are as marvellously implausible as, for example, the expression ‘in fine’ – perhaps Henry James might be ...”

“... prose style with its witty banter, metaphorical gusto, dazzling vocabulary and sheer erudition may be seen as a heroic attempt to pull himself out of the quagmire by turning all that happens to or around him into fineness. He is a pathological enhancer, whether of his own gaucheries and existential contingencies, other people’s table-talk or ...”

“... organising educational meetings and publishing some meticulous research. Such forms of remembering may be amateur, haphazard, even verging on the idiosyncratic. What makes them so impressive is that they depend entirely on individuals. To expect grand municipal gestures of commemoration or large inclusive histories from such communities is to overlook the ...”

“... us as a family, but we are part of its revolutionary story and provide much of its romance. In May 1917, Michael Collins came down for a few days to Longford, one of those anonymous midland counties that tourists in Ireland pass through quickly on the way to somewhere they’ve been told to go. It is a boggy and flat array of fields, interrupted by a few ...”

“... a nasty jolt. No one knows the extent of the ‘pacification’ in the Twenties, but 200,000 Kurds may have perished in the process of deportation, while many others were undoubtedly killed in their villages. An early justification for the campaign against the Kurdish tribes was supplied to a British diplomat by Turkey’s foreign minister in 1927: Their ...”

“... and the foundation of that structure was patronage, unprecedented in its scale and scope. He may well have been its biggest beneficiary. By mid-1923, Weaver had made gifts to a trust for Joyce amounting to £21,000 and he was earning £1050 per year. Contact with Pound and Weaver brought about another change. Joyce now had an audience, however small, and ...”

“... garage in a small bay by the side of the road, on a dangerous bend. No sign, no indication of what may lie beyond it, but we know by now that it’s the only construction between Wilsford and Lake. And as we pile out, to stand under trees of an alarming height, I see the roof of the cottage my father went to so much unrewarded trouble to make. Thatch lies ...”