“... considering the question, ‘What is an author?’ The two, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League – novelists will have to invent a chance encounter in a basement club in Austin. Moreover, Junior’s general ignorance of ...”

“... the Dardanelles?’ they used to shout at him whenever he got up in Parliament – though that may have been unfair: most of the government and the high command, including Kitchener, were initially behind him. Kitchener’s reputation ended up pretty battered too, though he was drowned before it became a problem. Gallipoli has become one of those military ...”

“... organisation on unsuspecting civilian targets and a massive Japanese attack on a naval base may seem a misjudgment, but it was not surprising. That a president would use such a crisis for his own purposes – Roosevelt effectively, Bush disastrously – might also have been expected. But that ‘Ground Zero’, the hypocentre of the first nuclear bomb ...”

“... eyes and listen to the music (remarkable by any standards) but not to read the supertitles. That may be the best advice when all is said and done, but it wouldn’t have pleased Wagner. His commitment to opera as drama was vehement and frequently announced. (In his essays, Wagner was the kind of writer who never says anything once.) And, for better or ...”

“... Cosmologia Sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology, Thomas Burnett’s Theory of the Earth, Richard Bentley’s Sermons on the Boyle Foundations, George Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles, Henry More’s Antidote against Atheism, Matthew Hale’s Primitive Origination of Mankind, William Camden’s Remains, Newton’s Optics and works by Sir Kenelm ...”

“... any importance in society? We will then be able to say how near Pope came to Juvenal. Meanwhile it may be observed that the poems in question seem to contain no reference to such an approach; also, although Juvenal may well have annoyed some of his contemporaries, he did not employ the name of anyone who was both alive and ...”

“... looked down on them. Lord Lambton’s heroines are of the same flesh as us, though their blood may be bluer. Maria Luisa Bombal specialises in the portrayal of another kind of aristocratic heroine, commuting between the labyrinthine South American cities and dense, tropical landscapes which secrete occasional, decaying estates, taking refuge from the ...”

“... are there to be drawn. The first, though Hersh never quite says it, is that the Presidency itself may have a flaw, a flaw made worse when the incumbent is a Nixon: its power is monarchical. The President of the United States is the executive. His power rests on a piece of parchment drawn up when Catherine the Great was Empress of All the Russias and George ...”

“... barons of parallel reality and fiscal mockery – Apple, Google, Amazon etc. Skinner’s bludgeon may be absent, his menu of reinforcements may be diluted but his intentions stretch from the grave. According to one of Norman Foster’s apparatchiks working on the Apple project, ‘We have a building that is pushing social ...”

“... Why … are people prepared to lay down their lives for their country?’ Some of the answers may lie in the enabling detachment of kinship emotion from its original sources. Such feelings can be strengthened, even as they are diffused or redeployed. Because this kind of siblinghood is ‘metaphorical’, it doesn’t follow that it’s weaker, or watered ...”

“... a swansong of passivity in the drawing-room; and, above all, the opera libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Arabella. These, I would say, constitute half a safety-net, half a ball and chain, meaning that Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) won’t ever go away. All the same, when ...”

“... to paranoia. Not the paranoid style in American politics, to quote the title of a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter (how could anyone say farewell to a mode so lavishly on the rise?), but to the paranoid fictions that animated DeLillo’s own novels The Names (1982) and Libra (1988), and went all the way back to Pynchon’s V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 ...”

“... and I recognised the not-quite-extraterrestrial, dumpy, middle-aged forms of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton panting their way up the hill. The glow was not, of course, from their outward perfection, nor their inner beauty and wisdom, but the result of years and years of attention from precision-ground lenses and high-wattage lights being focused and ...”

“... Marxist political systems similar to those in Eastern Europe. And while even such regimes may not be entirely reliable, at least they are less liable to sudden changes because of the overthrow of a regime or the changing interests of a particular leader; and even when this does happen (as in Afghanistan), the Soviets then at least have a pretext for ...”

“... deadpan account of the tracking and capture of Eichmann in The House on Garibaldi Street; Richard Deacon, The Israeli Secret Service, which tells the story, among others, of Wolfgang Lotz, the Israeli spy with unassailably Aryan looks who infiltrated Egyptian government circles to get plans for rocket sites and the names of German technicians: a story ...”