“... child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ...”

“... labyrinthine plot – ‘If you come in five minutes after this picture begins,’ the trailer said, ‘you won’t know what it’s all about’ – produced more meaning than it ever intended, or could hope to contain. The plot at its simplest: Sergeant Raymond Shaw (played by Harvey) is a Korean War veteran, winner of a Medal of Honor, who, along with ...”

“... Mangan’s temperament than in his poems and essays: Mangan’s ‘purely defensive reserve’, he said, ‘is not without dangers for him, and in the end it is only his excesses that save him from indifference’. Joyce recalled the passage, then already famous, in which Walter Pater completed his ‘imaginary portrait’ of Watteau: ‘He has been a sick man ...”

“... into being ‘after native men and women were kicked out of their homes to make way for one of Edward I’s imposing ring of castles’. It may have happened seven hundred years ago, but it still grates. Today the English come to Wales not with weapons but with bank balances that enable them to buy second homes. And there is still resistance. Between 1979 ...”

“... Auden appears wrapped up in himself and a cigarette: ‘I kept thinking,’ Hockney reportedly said afterwards, ‘if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ Not everyone was struck in quite that way, but everyone was struck, and Auden himself realised that he had not lost his looks so much as become photogenic in a new and unexpected ...”

“... in. He was chairman of Tory Action, which campaigned so successfully in 1974 and 1975 to remove Edward Heath as Tory leader and replace him with Thatcher. He even stood for Parliament himself. But he was, as the memo makes clear, deeply suspicious of anything which smacked of democracy. It threw up waverers, compromisers, ready phrases and flashing ...”

“... Tamerlane, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun can hardly be dismissed as unimportant, but it must be said that little of world-shaking significance has happened there lately, although there are signs that this may now be changing. The most famous Inner Asian of our own times was probably Irving Berlin, and he left at a very early age. Where the Golden Horde has ...”

“... in extenuation it might be pleaded that the theme was friendship, not unfriendliness. It should be said straight away that the selection of poems in Emrys Jones’s New Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse is quite splendid, a veritable treasure house (to use a ludicrous outdated trope); there are no shocking omissions to deprecate, and if some of the poems are ...”

“... of Past and Present – his ‘Tract for the Times’, though ‘not in the Pusey vein’, as he said – with its eloquent attacks on aristocratic partridge-shooting and Parliamentary do-nothingism and its sympathetic exposure of the wretchedness of the urban poor, Carlyle visited Liverpool. He described conditions in Formby in a (hitherto ...”

“... Cairns, delivered a farewell speech in which he reflected on the political situation. Ulster, he said, had been cynically betrayed by Britain’s policies: policies that had relegated it to ‘the status of a Fuzzy Wuzzy colony’. The Lord Mayor’s parting shot is one of my favourite quotations, for as well as being banal, ridiculous, righteously angry and ...”

“... today. Galen, prince of ancient physicians, was by any standards a penetrating thinker. In 1798 Edward Jenner, a hero in the pantheon of physicians, described the use of cow-pox matter to prevent smallpox. This piece of detective work remains a classic. Jenner’s observational powers are also testified to by his being the first to note that it is the ...”

“... must, if it is to have a chance of winning the next election, adopt a ‘conservative’ line. Edward Kennedy is not being repudiated only because of his morals. The liberals of the eastern seaboard are in a defeated state of chaos and confusion. The socialist parties of Western Europe rely for their support on mindless trade-unionists or equally mindless ...”

“... on one side of James’s divide – that of feeling the past familiar. Not that Russell can be said to have made it interesting, for in his torrid film all the hysteria and none of the genius of the English on Lake Geneva has been caught and condensed into ninety minutes of writhing in mud, blood, rats, leeches, spit and foam (mostly from Claire’s ...”

“... the Community’s spokesmen, advocates or analysts had ever disguised its ambitions. In 1962, when Edward Heath was first negotiating terms for British membership, one of his French interlocutors – later a minister – made the point in words reminiscent of a British Army marching song. ‘We don’t know where we’re going,’ he ...”

“... closeness was what she had experienced with her mother and it was what she was used to. She once said that if a person you love commits suicide, as her mother did, you spend the rest of your life trying to find similar relationships and playing out the ending you never had with the person who died. As a writer, too, Janet was mainly interested in her own ...”