“... Montpellier University and lived several years in France and Belgium. Molotov is reported to have said of him: ‘He is very handsome and leaves a good impression. He is quite cultured but you sense Western influence in his upbringing.’ He has been described as a ‘garrulous charmer’. He was the main political leader in the Resistance and, at 73, is the ...”

“... because her spirit was too independent, too argumentative, too much – as Coleridge shudderingly said – that of a ‘blue-stocking’. She received a uniformly bad press from the poets and their admirers and wives and families because she stuck too loyally to the idea of feminine enlightenment which they in their age were supposed to endorse. She did not ...”

“... Word is Our Bond’, which reappears now in The Lords of Limit, a volume which, it must be said, in everything from format to price does very great credit to the publishers. This particular essay has provoked in another attentive reader, John Lucas (LRB, Vol. 5, No 20), the reflection that ‘language cannot be innocent.’ But surely it needs to be ...”

“... a tragedy, that the objects I had enjoyed trying to identify – was this Prince Albert or a young Edward VII? – also represented something unknowably private and painful.Objects from the past, if they survive, lose and accrue meaning over time. Their original human associations and contexts, their given purposes and original attractions, dissolve and are ...”

“... that there was anything very equitable about his dealings with them. As the Jacobean diplomat Sir Edward Hoby observed, it was ‘lawful for a Christian to take away anything from infidels’. Pynchon was a restless man and six years after his arrival in America he headed a group of settlers who moved from Massachusetts Bay to a new site. Formerly the home ...”

“... have indicated are not for polite society. ‘Strumpet and stomach and damn must never, never be said,’ sang one Victorian vicarage family in the isolation of their nursery. ‘Red, white and blue, dirty kangaroo, sitting on a lamp-post doing number two,’ was what we used to mutter in our Surrey back-garden. My great uncle, a Presbyterian minister, once ...”

“... from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry anthologies cashed in on the landmark case of Donaldson v. Becket, which more or less destroyed copyright law; there were the pioneering ...”

“... of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the ...”

“... happened to the 1930s poets, who had much to say about the condition of England, though it is said, with what accuracy I don’t know, that the four elements of the MacSpaunday group – MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis – were only once in the same room together; and there can have been but few occasions when the whole company of Angry Young Men ...”

“... sinuses). A speech-writer who at times had to flee the suffocating heat of the President’s study said Roosevelt seemed to enjoy sweating and wiping his wet brow. Nixon loved air-conditioning. In summer he would turn the thermostat down as low as it would go, so he could toast himself by a blazing log fire in the synthetic chill. Extreme as Nixon’s virtuoso ...”

“... Martin Kraus, known to posterity as Martin Crusius, could, by his own admission, ‘rightly be said to be drunk with love for Greek affairs’. To him each new arrival presented an opportunity to learn about the Greeks and their language. Eventually, as Richard Calis writes, Crusius ‘compiled the period’s richest record of Greek life under Ottoman ...”

“... for a seductress. Two of her skins were the gifts of Imperial statesmen who perhaps should have said it with flowers. ‘Preposterous’ is the word one tries not to apply to Elinor Glyn. Red-haired, green-eyed, intense, snobbish, spendthrift, a devilish fine woman in a tableau vivant, the tease of kings and proconsuls, an unstoppable redecorator, a ...”

“... faulty. I recall an almost unbelievable evening’s talk in the mid-Seventies with the late Sir Edward Youde when he was Ambassador in Beijing, in the course of which he seemed to be trying to persuade me that Deng was really a closet liberal in the broadest sense of that word. I thought for an hour or so this was just a diplomat’s game, to test my ...”

“... in the last fortieth of a second. ‘We are surrounded by people,’ Brower is supposed to have said, ‘who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal but they are stark, raving mad.’ Brower was a formidable operator and his congregation already knew the theology: they just ...”

“... meeting he looked old and ungainly, but his power & eloquence as a speaker were homeric. But I said at the time that but for his speaking he was in appearance like a cross between a fiend and a tallow chandler. Rossetti, whose friendship is the one most rewardingly described, is also best shown at his worst, or most exasperating. He stayed with the Browns ...”