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“... the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public ...”

“... lunch was over. He strikes a similar note when telling a story of Geoffrey Grigson, who held forth with characteristic trenchancy on the shortcomings of Horizon as the name for a magazine: who could ever have come up with that? ‘“Well,” I said, “as a matter of fact, I thought of Horizon.” This mollified him somewhat.’ His reminiscences of ...”

“... Democrat-Gazette, ‘he takes it.’ He wants to have his dozen Big Macs and eat them too. And so forth. (I myself have contributed a one-liner: ‘Why did Bill Clinton cross the road? Because he wanted to get to the middle.’) In earnest sessions with interviewers, the most overtly therapeutic of which was given to Good Housekeeping, Clinton himself has ...”

“... flotilla of minesweepers (though they were kept in a separate harbour, Port Edgar, across the Forth). Ten thousand or so civilians worked at the dockyard to repair and supply the fleet, and went to and from their work in fleets of buses and special trains. Many had come north from the Royal Navy’s heartland in Southern ...”

“... genitalium, Steinberg names it, on the analogy of ostentatio vulnerum, the showing forth of the wounds) is emphasised in all manner of ways. The ostentatio is sometimes made by the Virgin, holding aside the child’s covering, sometimes by the infant himself, pictured with a hand on his penis, as in Veronese’s Holy Family with St Barbara and ...”

“... Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden he went to bed; also, according to Hillier (citing Peter Quennell), he ...”

“... choicest dishes were consumed, and very old brandy followed the champagne, Churchill would hold forth on grand strategy or any other subject that took his fancy, such as egalitarianism and the White Ant. Never can a prime minister have concealed so little of the workings of his mind. Admittedly there were some things Colville did not know. He did not attend ...”

“... has finally collapsed. Secondly, the war democratised Ford, and thereby democratised Tietjens. Christopher Tietjens, as a result of his love for Valentine Wannop and his experience of trench warfare, is prised out of his class prejudices. Such a humanist and sentimental theme would not have been admissible in a ‘French-style’ novel, and we are to see ...”

“... and necessary for governments to respond immediately to distant crises. ‘From the present time forth,’ the British geographer Halford Mackinder wrote in 1904, ‘we shall have to deal with a closed political system … one of worldwide scope. Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and ...”

“... Titles of most Learned, most Accurate, most Ingenious, most Judicious, most Illustrious, and so forth, tells them when they are met, that they are a company of Blunderers and Blockheads, and that there is a Commentator in the World, one Dr. B, more Learned, Accurate, Ingenious, Judicious and Illustrious than all of them put together. This representation of ...”

“... punishment any more (except for Islamic fundamentalists and those Christian evangelicals who think Christopher Hitchens will go to hell), but the concept of an afterlife is still hard to throw over. The other day, my parents told me of an ageing friend who had recently abandoned his lifelong atheism and become a Christian. He told my parents, both churchgoing ...”

“... his texts exactly in so far as he wants them to state what can only be shadowed forth obliquely in a mode of self-denying or negative assertion. As de Man writes in a crucial passage: ‘The ineffable demands the direct adherence and the blind and violent passion with which Heidegger treats his texts. Mediation, on the other hand, implies a ...”

“... in the dark, all by myself ... I stood at the top of the stairs while German planes flew back and forth, and I knew I was on my own, that I couldn’t count on others for support. My fear vanished. I looked up at the sky and trusted in God. I have an intense need to be alone. Father noticed I’m not my usual self, but I can’t tell him what’s bothering ...”

“... The Longman series has a distinguished history stretching over nearly half a century. It includes Christopher Ricks’s exemplary Tennyson volume, later much enlarged to include variants from the Trinity MS, still under ban at the time of the first edition; the Milton volumes of Alastair Fowler and John Carey; and a good many others, including, more ...”

“... have the third category which no one will recognise, which is intelligence which moves back and forth between them.’ Twenty years later, another NSA official, quoted in Body of Secrets, explains what would happen if a member of al-Qaida crossed the American border. ‘We wouldn’t do the guy. It would be FBI who’d do him, because he’s a terrorist in ...”