“... rather than Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear Pepys. The persistent excellence of the stool has been one of this disease’s most tedious features. When will you get it into ...”

“... romantic hero of his early novels, Andrews in The Man Within, Oliver Chant in Name of Action, and Michael Crane in Rumour at Nightfall. There is too much self-love, too little self-criticism in these early portraits of pleasant anguished young men built up from Greene’s own notion of himself as a young man romantically caught in the toils of love.’ The ...”

“... in Britain, where, as a South African, he is banned from TV, but bigger than Springsteen or Michael Jackson in France). What would Danton have thought of the Revolution being commemorated by a left-wing South African singing Zulu rock in the South Pacific? Perhaps it’s best we don’t know. One longs, at times, for the more considered attitude of Mao ...”

“... a remarkable Jamesian epigraph about ‘the reporter and the reported’ from his 1896 essay on George Sand, in which he looks to a future when ‘the cunning of the inquirer’, exceeding ‘in subtlety and ferocity anything we today conceive’, will be met by ‘the pale forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt, and every letter ...”

“... than Brougham when he became ‘a political Ishmael’; Melbourne and Russell, Balfour and Lloyd George, were not significantly younger. That Brougham could ever have become prime minister is no doubt an improbable proposition, but his virtual eclipse at the age of 56 must constitute a problem in political history. It is a problem which Dr Stewart’s book ...”

“... If a 19th-century paternity exists for this novel, it is surely in the mannered accomplishments of George Meredith, who is credited in passing with being the most recent novelist to be studied in the Oxford English School. A Villa in France has that that beguiling property – so eminently characteristic of Meredith – of seeming to slide more or less ...”

“... most ramified of all the novels, the one with the most varied aspects to explore, as was shown in Michael Holquist’s Dostoevsky and the Novel and by Richard Peace’s remarkable examination, in Dostoevsky: The Major Novels, of its catacomb of religious symbolism and clash of hidden dogmas. It is a quarry for quite separate lines and kinds of study, like a ...”

“... of two steel blocks each by Richard Serra (for obvious reasons neither will be moved anytime soon).Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, calls the new design ‘smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless’. I would take ‘slightly soulless’ over ‘aggressively spectacular’, and given the political controversies visited on ...”

“... hearing the word “hypersonics”,’ one official remarked to an industry sponsored conference. Michael Griffin, undersecretary of defence for research and engineering, a hypersonics enthusiast, has spoken of the need for ‘maybe thousands’ of hypersonic weapons. ‘This takes us back to the Cold War,’ he announced cheerfully, ‘where at one point we ...”

“... notably a car bomb that went off outside the US embassy, killing nine people, just before George W. Bush’s visit to Peru in 2002 – it is no longer the threatening force it once was. Since 2000, when Fujimori was hounded from office, taking with him Montesinos and the architecture of repression they had built between them, the country has regarded ...”

“... to be earlier stages in the survey. The transition ‘From Memory to Written Record’, charted by Michael Clanchy a quarter-century ago, has no more eloquent harbinger. There hadn’t been anything like it before; or if there had, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicler had never heard of it. Yet the system it documents so thoroughly was not introduced by the survey, or ...”

“... Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, films like The Night Porter, and in the writings of Hannah Arendt, George Steiner, Bruno Bettelheim and a host of others. But on the subject of the nuclear holocaust there is a deafening silence. It is as if, somehow, the entire topic had been declared out of bounds, as if it were ‘unthinkable’. Such a state of affairs is ...”

“... not have been helped by the fact that he had also been backed by Viktor Orbán, and by Cardinal George Pell of Australia, who was convicted of sexual abuse in 2018 (the conviction was overturned on appeal two years later).Among the revellers at the ball was Alexander Tschugguel, a Catholic convert from Austria who delighted conservatives five years ago when ...”

“... recent Cabinet Ministers, only Ernest Bevin (two vols down, one to go) and Nye Bevan (canonised by Michael Foot) have received extended treatment, while the massive life of Churchill is unique in its Victorian dimensions. Today, the best way for a politician to guarantee this much-coveted form of life after death is to write it himself. And if he entertains ...”

“... Hurd, Fowler, Chalker and Ridley were produced – all divorced. Palmerston, Asquith and Lloyd George were cited as testimony to the morality of previous days and ages. Many were the cautions against hypocrisy. Mr Parkinson finally resigned on the morning of Friday, 15 October, at more or less the hour that copies of the last edition of the Times, complete ...”