“... preoccupations and tastes. In her straining after the essence of things, she reminds one of David Malouf and of Bruce Chatwin (who married into her clan). I don’t mean that she copies them: she is too committed, too intense for that; an element of what an American reviewer called ‘self-administered therapy’ convinces one that she is too seriously ...”

“... in July 1956. Irving compares the Writers Union with the Encyclopaedists’ preparation of the French Revolution, and eulogises the writer Julius Häy’s tours of the provinces – only to comment: ‘their contact with the real proletariat was a harrowing experience for intellectuals.’ When the action starts, the Circle is condemned as ‘trying to ...”

“... John Donne, and was seized upon by a readership anxious to stress the degeneracy of their own age. David Jones, an autochthonous Welsh, rather than Anglo-American, modernist of Poundian tendencies, offers another poet’s version of Johnson’s aperçu in his preface to the Anathemata (1952), and claims the Metaphysicals for Wales at the same time. Jones is ...”

“... case of a good reader, make better readings possible. Thus it is with the most perceptive of the French narrative analysts, Gérard Genette. He uses Proust as a reservoir of illustrations for his narrative poetics: but he also uses that poetics as a set of instruments for giving ‘a more precise description of Proustian narrative in its ...”

“... with wartime controls was an aberration. (Wartime America was much less obedient.) Cartoon by David Langdon for ‘Punch’, November 1949. Mark Roodhouse’s answer to the crude question of just how much black market activity there was in Britain, both during the war and in the period of postwar austerity, is that, though widespread, it was far less so ...”

“... view that Glasgow in the 1740s was ‘far behind’ in ‘taste’, with ‘neither a teacher of French nor of music in the town’, Crawford suddenly soars with great style, wielding his pen like the sword of truth over the heads of these self-satisfied popinjays. ‘Glasgow,’ he writes, ‘for this East Coast writer, could be summed up in the phrase ...”

“... lecturer, who, along with a significant number of radicals, later fell in with the Russophobe, David Urquhart, and like most of Urquhart’s followers, became a devotee of the Turkish bath. (The mania for hydropathy or water-cures is a little-known coda to Chartism, and worthy of further study.) Included, too, is Joseph Barker, another Methodist ...”

“... just stop playing around with your silly bombs,’ to coincide with a visit in 1995 by the French president, who had just announced a series of nuclear tests. In July 2015, I was present at a shambolic performance – he was 63 and appeared to be suffering from sciatica – in what can’t have been his first farewell tour. Undeterred by the six ...”

“... and provide the skills base needed by modern industry and commerce.’ To say nothing of Sir David Philips, Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, who remarked in 1988 that ‘decisions by the Government were “progressively leading to an unstable situation”.’ Fighting words, no doubt, but they have the unmistakably musty smell of ...”

“... parrot, representing clever vocalisation without much brain power, was Pure Word. If you were a French academic, you might say that he was un symbole de Logos. Being English, I hasten back to the corporeal: to that svelte, perky creature I had seen at the Hôtel-Dieu. I imagined Loulou sitting on the other side of Flaubert’s desk and staring back at him ...”

“... was to be frightfully smart and West End, wear beautifully-cut suits lounging on sofas in French-window comedies’. Fifty years later ‘I was asked to put suppositories up my bottom under the bedclothes and play a scene in the lavatory which I confess I found somewhat intimate.’ Knighthoods nothing: actors should be decorated for gallantry. This ...”

“... in Westminster, as against 630 in the Italian Chamber, 622 in the German Bundestag and 577 in the French Assembly. There are also 734 members of the House of Lords, as compared with the 343 members of the French Senate, the 315 of the Italian Senate and the 69 of the German Bundesrat. The UK also has generously provisioned ...”

“... or Britain. Traditionally, British diplomats had much less influence at the Ottoman court than French and Russian ones. In addition, the Foreign Office increasingly disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at ...”

“... it was said, had planted the boy’s father in front of Israeli gun positions and moved the French TV crew that recorded the killing into position nearby – all to prove an ideological point.Misrepresentation has made it almost impossible for the American public to understand the geographical basis of the events, in this, the most geographical of ...”

“... for example, or Maureen Forrester – and then follow this by listening to a countertenor, David Daniels, for example, or Andreas Scholl, or Iestyn Davies (or go on YouTube and listen to a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, singing the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’, with what Feldman called a vibrato that is ‘often ...”