“... but not without hope. John Fuller’s The Burning Boys is interested in other kinds of separation. David’s mother is killed in the Blitz, and he goes to live with his down-to-earth grandmother and nubile young aunt. His life goes underground. David covertly observes the strange adult goings-on around him, approaching ...”

“... London Evening Standard had turned down the editorship of the Times in favour of succeeding Sir David English at the Daily Mail. As a boy, wrote Sir Perry, he had wanted to be editor of the Times more than anything in the world. So when Mr Paul Dacre picked Rothermere’s Daily Mail in preference to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction ...”

“... the country’ – that’s to say, with two fictionalisations, at quite different levels, of what may or may not have happened. Her enquiry was eventually modified to ‘How does the standard image of wartime London match with memory and experience?’ This means that she has to consider the loss of confidence, by ...”

“... of this kind is the other reason it was a big mistake to think the South was Fascist. It may have been a one-party state, but the Democrats were not a one-state party. Southern Democrats didn’t have a single leader; theirs, as Katznelson says, was a ‘chaotic and anarchic’ organisation, riddled with local variations. More important, it was an ...”

“... channel, a thoroughfare, an axis of change.The basis of Phillips’s oblique affinity with Brontë may lie in their shared conviction that the storyteller, real or imaginary, must already be in place – however uneasily – before the story can be told. The introduction to Phillips’s A New World Order: Selected Essays (2001) sets each of four separate ...”

“... young photographers from Japan were taking pictures of other young photographers from Japan. It may be pretty ordinary to most children now – who all have paparazzi for parents – but I was still taken aback to see the scrum around anybody wearing a coloured sock. One man came along the street wearing red braces under a nice grey suit and the Japanese ...”

“... I can’t say that I’ve ever had a strong opinion – or any opinion – about Sean Penn. I may have watched a film he was in, and I booked but didn’t get as far as the cinema to see The Tree of Life. In future, I’ll be hanging on his every word. He finds Britain ‘colonialist, ludicrous and archaic’ for hanging on to the Malvinas, and refusing to try and come to an agreement with Argentina ...”

“... If the answer is yes, students are encouraged to place an announcement in their college newspaper. David Horowitz, a progressive activist turned conservative pundit, and an ally of SAF, runs an online journal, FrontPage Magazine, which claims 1.7 million hits a month. He has devoted considerable attention to the peace studies programme at Ball State University ...”

“... him. And if he embarks on a memoir of himself, or they on a biography, the falsity of presentation may once again begin. If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in ...”

“... Libération lay beneath a bridge during a firefight near Grozny while shells landed all about him. David Hearst of the Guardian and David Chater of Sky News, who had gone up to the village of Pervomaisk near Grozny to observe the Russian advance, were nearly killed by a shell and sniped at when they ran for cover. Witold ...”

“... to persecute as others have persecuted Jews and Negroes. Lord Arran, House of Lords, 12 May 1965 Producing a documentary to mark the 30th anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality, I was struck by the very Victorian restrictions on the lives of gay men in the Sixties. Victim, the film in which Dirk Bogarde plays a married barrister ...”

“... from Downing College.) Warner had a hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended him to David Garnett, another fantasist, whose Lady into Fox had been a great success in 1922. There seems to have been a market in those years for a peculiarly English brand of fantasy, but any imputation of parochialism must fail: Garnett was a man of wide ...”

“... and 1685, and in 1700 Solomon de Medina became the first Jew to receive an English knighthood. In David Katz’s words, ‘once Cromwell and Charles II realised that the Jews as a nation could never be admitted through the front door, they were anxious to go round the back themselves and let them in through the door reserved for tradesmen.’ How do we ...”

“... rest-rooms in the service stations,’ an old Rhodie counselled me. I can assure him that Zimbabwe may or may not be on its way to a new social order but standards are still holding up. ‘Rhodesia is super,’ the T-shirts used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. ...”

“... life but a game of cricket? – beauty the bat and man the ball,’ he’s quoted as saying in David Underdown’s book. The Duke, a big sponsor of the game in its years of consolidation in the second half of the 18th century, reverted on non-match days to his role of seducer of upper-class women, and no doubt felt that the life’s-a-game-of-cricket ...”