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“... clear-eyed brutes alike. The Magnificent Five, who in the Forties and early Fifties provided their masters with vast quantities of material, lived to see the KGB dilute the intelligence their thousands of foreign agents pumped back with massive draughts of ideological mush; and those of them who defected to Moscow actually helped them to do ...”

“... this: an 1886 lettter from Kipling (21 and still a journalist in India) to Crofts, one of his old masters at Westward Ho!; a scatter of references in letters to his son John at school (c. 1912) about avoiding chaps who engage in ‘beastliness’; a 1917 letter to an unidentified friend about the friend’s son (or nephew?) who has obviously just been ...”

“... Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Russia in 1951; Kim Philby was finally exposed in 1963; Anthony Blunt in 1979. The first three took refuge in Russia. Blunt died in disgrace, deserted both by the Leftist friends of his youth and by the Royal Family and his colleagues in the Establishment, who had patronised him in his prime. All through this period ...”

“... necessities of the body.’ The transition to bodily inhibition took place quite slowly, however: Anthony Wood complained that when Charles II’s courtiers left Oxford, they also left ‘their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars’. True civility was the property of the city. ‘Since classical times,’ Thomas ...”

“... a smartly intrusive authorial voice who seems to tell the reader what to think (‘Mrs Anthony knew instinctively that Mrs Pettigrew was a kindly woman. Her instinct was wrong’); tight, punctual, highly novelistic plots, in which small groups of people are revealed to be sinisterly and neatly connected to each other, as they rarely are in ...”

“... reason now for Moore to fight shy of being a war artist.War artists’ art, like the war novels of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, was stronger on boredom, home-front detail and character than adventure and horror. Nobody expected a Guernica – or if they did they didn’t get one. No Goya or Otto Dix emerged – the drawings Ronald Searle made in a Japanese ...”

“... writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner ...”

“... too, in the beautifully produced, unostentatious separate recent collections by Douglas Oliver and Anthony Barnett,* contributors to the Carcanet volume. ‘America’ is one acknowledged influence on these poets, though ‘America’ turns out to mean chiefly Ashbery, Olson and Pound. That there are other traditions to look to these days is clear from the ...”

“... volunteering) information about his role as intermediary between the royal couple and his Nazi masters. Charles Bedaux, who might have been persuaded to trade some such information in exchange for lenient treatment, committed suicide while under arrest for treason. Coco Chanel, an intimate friend of the Duchess, was arrested and charged with treason ...”

“... a living, but until late in the century it had a social stigma that rubbed off on all but a few masters of the craft, and in any case it offered little scope for writers ambitious to produce respectable, book-length works of literature. An alternative was comic journalism: skits, squibs, facetious or satirical articles, jokes, paid for at space rates. Such ...”

“... All this art is well enough in its way, though it lacks the generic point and fantasy of Anthony Powell’s excursions into the fine arts in A Dance to the Music of Time. Far from being pretentious, or a form of showing-off, it reveals a touching lack of self-confidence. She no more needs it than Pym needs the comedies and rituals of a churchy ...”

“... whatever brisk agent provocateur Walsingham has put in place. ‘Farewell, sweet Robyn,’ writes Anthony Babington to Robert Poley, who was one of the men who stood by as Marlowe was stabbed. ‘Farewell, sweet Robyn, if as I take thee true to me.’ Poley was anything but true: and Babington, briefly strung-up but fully conscious, was shortly afterwards ...”

“... used by the writer, the ‘reality’ you perceived turns out to be a chimera. (Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Shaffer and Ira Levin are masters of this kind of switch.) Looking back, you can now say that things were not what they seemed to be and looking forward with the experience in mind you will regard any clear and definite ...”

“... certainly not Mandela – took any decision without consulting Sisulu first. When I reviewed Anthony Sampson’s biography of Mandela in the LRB,* I raised the problem of Mandela’s own probable SACP membership. This was strongly contested by Sampson, and the notion is upsetting to many of the great man’s admirers because it might mean he’d lied in ...”

“... Lincoln should be taken from them, since he was too merciful a man to punish the Southern slave-masters as they deserved. The nation was still almost as hot-blooded as old John Brown had been before the war, a cruel terrorist in the cause of liberty, declaring: ‘Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.’ Such the wild sayings. Gore ...”