“... if it is about to bear one away from North Korea. No harsher judgment could be passed than that by George Blake, who told me: ‘I would rather go back to Wormwood Scrubs than North Korea.’ Korean reunification will undoubtedly come about more slowly than German reunification has done. The Russians have stopped their aid and started to demand payment in hard ...”

“... startling to someone used to – say – Marxist criticism, or to the work of art historians like Michael Baxandall and Frances Yates. The emphases and conclusions differ – as they do between the essayists here – but the principle of balancing evidence intrinsic to the painting against material that lies outside the frame to make a critical account is the ...”

“... five people because they could be presumed to be Roman Catholics. It is seventy years since Lloyd George presided over what was called at the time ‘a great act of statesmanship’ – the partition of Ireland. The treaty which imposed partition was recently celebrated in an enormous ITV drama documentary, superbly acted, expensively produced and totally ...”

“... influence of a good smoke on the writing capacities of Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell and Compton Mackenzie, he poses the large question whether ‘with abstainers multiplying, we may soon have to ask whether literature is going to become impossible – or has already begun to be impossible.’ It’s increasingly obvious, as one ...”

“... Medici Venus was admired, as the Cnidian statue had been, in alarming ways. The bibliophile Henry George Quin, for instance, records in his diary (extracts of which were published in an amusing article by Arthur Rau in the Book Collector in 1964) how, in the winter of 1785, he ‘stole’ into the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence when no one was there and ...”

“... as much as anything by his acquaintance with the charming, generous and talented aristocrat, Sir George Beaumont. Dorothy doted on the Beaumonts, and they returned her affection without a hint of patronage. It was typical of our pair – rebels as they had been – to become converted to the landed interest by meeting such an enlightened member of the ...”

“... James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother thing. Perhaps George Raft came close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank ...”

“... the government at 96 per cent. So, in the words of Mark McKinnon, a former political adviser to George W. Bush, ‘Romney’s comment managed to offend just about everyone in America.’ No it didn’t. The 96 per cent don’t think in one mind about anything. Many of the 47 per cent will self-identify with the 53 per cent. Many of the 53 per cent will ...”

“... was the year in which the judicial committee of the Privy Council overturned a judgment against George Denison, archdeacon of Taunton, who had been deprived of his living for publishing sermons that seemed, by endorsing belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the sacraments, to contravene two of the 39 Articles of the Church of England. Today it is an ...”

“... I, is a case in point – but the other big piece he presented to the king, Landscape with St George and the Dragon, lifts off into poetry. The fact that the scene is unmistakeably the Thames Valley does a lot of the work, for any history-aware viewer who registers also the dragon-vanquishing knight-cum-king, the fair English rose he’s redeeming, and ...”

“... search for a solution to the problems of capitalism. The socio-economic reforms enacted by Lloyd George and the ‘New Liberal’ government of 1906-14 were influenced by Seebohm Rowntree’s concept of a poverty line as well as an imperialist drive for national efficiency. But for Tawney and his successors, these solutions were grounded in ...”

“... Many Hollywood stars, for example, attend AA, but you won’t find yourself sitting next to Michael Douglas unless you happen to be in the industry and making seven-figure alimony payments. There is no copyright on the 12-step formula and any number of look-alike therapies have borrowed it: Al-Anon, Al-Ateen, Chocanon, MA (Marijuana Anonymous), Weight ...”

“... the components was Streptococcus regius, so called because it had been grown from pus taken from George V’s chest. All the staphylococcal vaccines from St Mary’s were useless. But they brought an antimicrobial benefit: the profits from their sale funded the department where Fleming worked and where he discovered penicillin.In evolutionary time MRSA are ...”

“... has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a tradition of high-flying speculation about literature, which we costive islanders cannot afford not to profit by’. ‘Speculation’, ‘afford’ and ‘profit’ put a poet’s pressure on ‘costive’. Yet should Davie ...”

“... Savage, John Travolta), though some were filmed and then dropped (Bill Pullman, Mickey Rourke). George Clooney was cast, scripted, shot and widely promoted, but he was on screen for just 83 seconds. In an army of a million stories we are not expected to take any particular individual seriously. Nothing justifies or explains the war; it is the spasm of a ...”