“... of Jewish mysticism, was being introduced at a lecture in New York. Mysticism, the introducer said sarcastically, is nothing; but a history of nothing – well, that is science. The same can be said, multipliedly, of Derwent May’s book, which is essentially a history of the book review, a genre of such tiny dignity ...”

“... up an admirer of Nietzsche and the German intellectual tradition. He grew his moustache, so he said, ‘to convey an impression of Nietzsche’, and set himself the target, which he only just failed to reach, of becoming a professor at an even younger age than his exemplar. What with this and with his rise in the Army from private soldier to the youngest ...”

“... protect and promote their own authority and will do so unscrupulously if they must. If this can be said by an Orwell it is even better. Nor are these categories of only negative utility: a moral critique of this sort carries with it a particular imperative which political and bureaucratic systems find difficult to resist. Yet its utility can also be ...”

“... in the first paragraph, where Tuchman describes the funeral procession that followed the bier of Edward VII in May 1910: ‘The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again.’ Five ...”

“... after, in the nicest possible way, she dumped him; he is still an invalid today. Kissing Marilyn, said Tony Curtis, was like kissing Hitler. As Sammy Davis Jr put it: ‘She hangs like a bat in the minds of the men that knew her.’ Or like a dove. The other portrait Miller drew of his bride was Roslyn in The Misfits, driven by her animal recoil from any form ...”

“... self-satisfied French tradition of announcing and defining, Derrida must none the less be said to be spot-on about diaries. He says in Of Grammatology: ‘I can answer the threat of the other as other (than I) only by transforming it into another (than itself) through altering it in my imagination.’ I recalled these oracular words when browsing in ...”

“... rein’ at the first hint of fisticuffs. He quoted with appreciation R.B. Cunninghame Graham, who said that Shaw was ‘the first man to run away from Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday’. (Cunninghame Graham went to prison as a result of the riot.) This is all of a piece with Shaw, once the youthful Fenian, having not the smallest desire to live either in ...”

“... aching lumps of flesh, crushed together and wanting to be separate ...   ‘I’m hungry,’ said Rob. I laughed aloud in relief.   ‘You’re always hungry!’   ‘Yes, but now I could eat anything. I could eat Miss Gallagher.’    It was an old fantasy of ours. How would we cook her to make her edible? Long, slow roasting after a ...”

“... Maude alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based solutions like Iain Macleod and Edward Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various ...”

“... Lauda was asked by the press why he hadn’t stopped to help. ‘I’m paid to race,’ he said, ‘not to stop.’ The ‘formula’ of F1 refers to the various rules governing the design of the cars laid down by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile and intended to even out differences between the teams, but everyone knows that the ...”

“... Goodden’s biographical account makes little attempt to elaborate critically on what has been said already about the art, or to suggest that it has any greater depth than has generally been thought, but by discussing art and life together Goodden makes clear the extent to which the tension between appearance and reality in Kauffman’s paintings was ...”

“... with a few other things, then take the one you really wanted to the desk with some gesture that said, ‘Oh well, I might as well pick up this old thing too.’ I hoped the volume was going to be Richard Bentley’s 1711 edition of Horace, which is full of his sometimes inspired and sometimes not so inspired conjectural emendations. When I got it home I ...”

“... office for a relatively short time over a long political career, largely because of what he said, or the way he said it. The ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968 ended his front-bench career and remains a focus of scrutiny. It was the speech at once of a politician on the stump and a classicist on the ...”

“... was thought grubby and generally pretty hopeless, but they remained friends, and Phineas Finn is said to be partly based on Sir William. Marriage to a man born in 1817 and, in his time, so eminent, must have improved Lady Gregory’s knowledge of history. In his youth her husband had turned down Peel’s offer of the post of Irish Lord of the Treasury, and ...”

“... his cameraman, and offer subtle direction to his actors (‘If you would just come now,’ he once said calmly when a camera was threatening to overheat). Often he would star in his productions himself. Alfred Kinsey’s cinematic oeuvre first came to light in 1972 when Wardell Pomeroy, who worked for Kinsey and had taken down 8000 of the 18,000 sex histories ...”