“... is that a biography showing that Nancy Reagan isn’t a very nice woman is besides the point. She may have been and probably was a bad mother to her children. She may have indulged in lesbian practices at Smith, and been an expert at oral sex in Hollywood. Perhaps she did have a long-running affair with Frank ...”

“... won, making Shakespeare into ‘a true Englishman’ and ‘a sturdy John Bull’, and Bate may well be right in speculating that Wordsworth had at the back of his mind these sorts of class parody – reflecting Henry Crawford’s complacent comment in Mansfield Park – when he deplored the notion of a self-satisfied ‘taste’ for poetry, as if for ...”

“... and discouragement more often than is generally thought. One such occasion occurred in May 1962. General Salan, one of the leaders of the unsuccessful putsch in Algiers the previous year and now the leader of the Organisation Armée Secrète which was trying to foment civil war, had been arrested and put on trial for his life. His lawyers turned ...”

“... reads this, or as he would probably prefer to say, if he has this ‘drawn to his attention’, he may care to know that more than one of the guests gave me separate but identical accounts of his conduct at this soirée. He evidently has a knack of inspiring affection and loyalty in his friends.) Now, I am merely a lone scribe living on my depleted wits. Do I ...”

“... the nickname itself derives from schooldays at Winchester rather than from Labour politics, and it may well be true that Crossman bore the title all his life. Still, I’m quite clear that he earned it afresh, as it were. There’s an old Claud Cockburn doggerel that goes (from my memory): Here lies the body of Dick Double-Crossman, Classical don with ...”

“... woman can become pregnant from a sexual encounter, but a man cannot.’ The men in Road to Divorce may be presented through the filter of modern notions like these: but it seems to me that as far as the women go, Stone has bought an entirely contemporary version of events and feelings. The women in this book are creatures of late 18th and early 19th-century ...”

“... into exile to avoid execution. Some readers rightly admire Socrates’s moral convictions; others may find them pointlessly rigid; everyone ought to find them puzzling. It is even more puzzling that he claims to have found a rational defence of his convictions through the sorts of cross-examination that we find in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates conducts ...”

“... garden of ideas sets off on a long decline towards the floral clock – which the digital watch may eventually render obscure in its turn. But though the editors comment regretfully on the increasing alienation of modern life, the contemporary parks that they include, Disneyland and the spectacular switchback at Valencia, are indications that although we ...”

“... the miners’ union leaders throughout their stay in Bucharest. Whatever else the Ceausescu regime may have been responsible for, it did not resort to open violence on this scale. Using the miners to suppress the opposition was a tactic original to the new regime and had fascistic elements. The miners’ racism became evident when they made a particular target ...”

“... myself plagues them with the mystery of why and how a living person can actually do things which may be only those dark images and acts secretly within them. I believe they can identify with these ‘dark images and acts’ and loathe anything which reminds them of this dark side of themselves. The usual reaction is a flood of popular self-righteous ...”

“... where the author is so hard on his characters that the reader wants to leap to their defence: it may embarrass male readers, making them uneasy about their own fatherhood and sonship. Nevertheless, despite the grimness, Sir Denis often refreshes the imagination with enlivening accounts of what was, to all seeming, a happy and enviable boyhood. The book is ...”

“... May the 24th is Bob Dylan’s 50th birthday. To anyone involved with Dylan in the mid-Sixties, say during his medicine-fuelled blaze with the Band through Australia and Europe in 1966, the fact that he is not only alive but still performing twenty-five years later must in itself seem utterly extraordinary. One of the key aspects of the Dylan myth during those roller-coaster years was that he wouldn’t be around much longer ...”

“... had been run through, is more or less true. Some five hundred scientists gathered in Vienna in May 1991 to say that the genetic abnormalities which had occurred since Chernobyl were not statistically higher than they would have been, had there been no accident, and that the incidence of cancers was relatively low. They were simply not believed, nor are ...”

“... is style, there is inevitably density, Dichtung. There’s no end to the ways in which reality may be thought about and, therefore, written about, written about and, therefore, thought about. The repertoire of possible styles is infinite. Density can be achieved in a simple sentence as well as in an elaborate one. So a fairer comparison for the sentences ...”

“... as in so many of his barrack-room card games, he ended up with misère: Querétaro fell on 15 May 1867. Maximilian tried ineffectually to escape and then surrendered. He and his two leading Mexican generals were court-martialled and sentenced to be shot. European and American intercession failed to win a reprieve: feelings in the liberal camp ran too ...”