“... many gay people; I was so busy being picked up on the beach. (I was rather unbalanced and very self-destructive.) I tell Arthur about Pirate Bill, whom I’d met in a bar; he’d invited me out on his boat, boasting that he’d been in prison for smuggling mercury. (Arthur points out that mercury is legal, so how could Pirate Bill have been smuggling ...”

“... is not. Hoare’s own rather tentative estimate of this ‘enormously talented man’ (Coward’s self-description, from which it is hard to dissent) has to be sought out, a sentence or two at a time, throughout these densely packed pages. Mainly the asides are critical: This Happy Breed was ‘an affecting tribute to a mythical England; a Cockney neoromantic ...”

“... offered by the bulk of the intelligentsia of Western Europe and the US for a Wilsonian concept of self-determination has been disastrous. Little and Silber are justly more sympathetic in their assessment of the 1993 Vance-Owen peace plan than most British commentators. Many British and American journalists, politicians and historians were withering in their ...”

“... in. And second, a point to which Moore is entirely alert, transcendental idealism looks to be self-refuting. If you really can’t say anything about the world except as it is represented, then one of the things that you can’t say is that you can’t say anything about the world except as it is represented. For, the intended contrast is between how the ...”

“... of 1968 as an attempt by the young to dissociate themselves from these crimes: ‘the parade of self-righteousness ... the sounds and noise ... were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit.’ Michael marries a fellow law student called Gertrud, but they drift amicably apart. All he feels is pity for ...”

“... the Soho caverns. Billing became manager of the Richmond Theatre, invented a machine for making ‘self-lighting’ cigarettes, wrote plays, built his own bungalow in Crawley (it even had a well and some ‘little brick dairies’) and had a go at amateur farming. He flew planes. He trained as a barrister. Trying to cross the Solent to the Isle of Wight in his ...”

“... steppes. So ends Volume Two. Thereafter Fu Manchu was transformed by his creator from an entirely self-serving villain to a dedicated anti-Communist. The idea of ‘the greatest menace to the West since Attila the Hun’ fighting flat out for democracy is almost too painful to contemplate, but the old China the Doctor was hoping to revive had itself been ...”

“... a grating and often so low a way?’ This examiner was no doubt a norm-alien, searching for that self-conscious purity of intellectual style that would express itself, as another graduate of the ENS fondly recalled, in the fact that ‘everyone’ (that’s to say, every graduate from the rue d’Ulm) ‘knows perfectly well’ that every night in the ...”

“... all while effecting economies: the labour of ‘low-grade’ defectives would make such colonies self-financing. Who was to deny that such solutions made sense? Certainly, few of the mentally handicapped could raise voices of complaint (‘Mother says it done me good,’ wrote one imbecile of life in a colony). Time was when relatives had been quite ...”

“... match he complained of fatigue, one could see why: he’d been tight as a drum. Nick Bollettieri, self-styled ‘best tennis coach in the world’, claims he can help prevent such collapses, a view shared (for varying periods of time) by Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Monica Seles, Mary Pierce, Jim Courier, Anna Kournikova and Mark Philippousis, among ...”

“... in common with her father than with her mother, had, at the age of 17, run off with one of those self-same South Americans and was now living with him in Caracas. At this point, Mme de Blazac’s tiny hands were pressed to her eyes, while I maintained a respectful silence. To my relief I was never asked about myself, and in Mme de Blazac’s heartbroken ...”

“... reinforced by cultural change. It began with the invention of printing, and was reinforced by the self-conscious change from the culture of the image to the culture of the word implicit in the Reformation. This is the change which has gone into reverse since the invention of television. Increasingly, people wanting to capture the attention of a school class ...”

“... or the indolent disposition to succumb to tyranny. Love can also lose its way amid idleness and self-absorption. The Arcadia is saturated with the language of political morality, but it also teems with references to a political pathology of the heart: ‘vehement love’, ‘torments’, ‘hellish agony’, ‘disease’. And here, too, we sense the ...”

“... also translates Native American stories). The Bird Artist was content to stay within this self-contained domain; The Museum Guard represents an attempt to break out – and is not entirely successful. From the fey, unreal atmosphere of Halifax we are suddenly transplanted to prewar Amsterdam. There is also an ill-advised change of narrator, with the ...”

“... life, or at least his circumstances, up to 1961 or thereabouts. It is not an intimate self-portrait: there is far more intimacy in the poems. Rounding the Horn includes The Guest from the Future(1995), The Anzac Sonata (1986), A Familiar Tree (1978) and generous selections from Hand in Hand (1974), Root and Branch (1969), Out of Bounds (1963) and ...”