“... revolution was that of February 1917, and that the October power seizure by the Bolsheviks was little more than an opportunistic coup d’état. History has also taken an increasingly nasty view of Lenin. For so many decades, oppositional Communists and post-Stalinist leaders of the Soviet Union would condemn abuses of power by describing them as ...”

“... larger than a battalion, did not attend staff college and learn to plan operations, and showed little interest in logistics. Many of the battles he fought with his own commanders during World War Two revolved around these gaps in his military experience: at root he remained a subaltern, lecturing generals. Subaltern studies have their place, however, and ...”

“... she smiled sweetly and said, ‘Oh, you’ve scooted across the park from the West Side in your little brown suit and your big brown shoes.’ To which the Brooklyn boy still alive in me replied: ‘Fuck you, Jackie’ ... And so we became even faster friends than we already were. Who would expect anything different? There is something very revealing about ...”

“... and a huge jowl shaded to look excessively meaty and anything but skull-like. But the face gives little away. His expression is that of a man who is as mildly vain as we all are when our picture is taken. Mostly, however, he has the air of a man who is concentrating hard on sitting still, which is as much as you can say of most portraits before the invention ...”

“... and tells us how to act; the rest is totalitarianism. It seemed at the time both lofty and a little vague and Sartre didn’t buy it, but he was duty-bound to review the book. After much hesitation he assigned it to Francis Jeanson, ex-Alger républicain (and later a clandestine courier in France for the FLN). Jeanson took Camus apart. He saw his ...”

“... film itself. It was being screened by Channel 4, a station known then for its obscurity (it was so little-watched that a common joke went: ‘Where do married couples go when they want to elope?’ ‘Channel 4’) and its liberal attitude towards the depiction of sex and nudity. The opening scenes, which featured rundown London squats and tenement ...”

“... Council sends to Biennales, what’s shortlisted for the Turner Prize, no ‘conspiracy’ in little magazines and private galleries would matter. The Saatchi Gallery, just because it seems so influential in these areas, has acquired a quasi-public status. True, the ‘contemporary art’ camp can be extremely touchy too. There was outrage in 1991, when a ...”

“... The publication of the ODNB has been the occasion for many ‘big compliments’ and rather little nagging. Well-meaning colleagues have rushed to provide me with examples of errors, but since every visit to shelf or screen has left me in a state of head-shaking amazement at the quantity of exact information packed into its pages, I feel no inclination ...”

“... His father – a schoolmaster, modestly successful, upright, thrifty, living well a life of which little was to be expected – outlived him. His first music lessons were with his father (violin) and his brother (piano). When he was eight, he was sent to the local choirmaster for instruction in singing, counterpoint and organ. At eleven, he won a place as a ...”

“... of people picking their noses. One began life, as Gopnik puts it, as a picture ofa normal little boy wearing shorts but was soon reworked into a full-frontal of a young man with a shock of blond hair and an adult’s chest hair, completely naked except for a pair of girlish Mary Janes on his feet. There’s no way that anyone who knew Warhol could ...”

“... bloke, though I would much rather have followed you round the world and blacked your boots’. Little else had ever been said, and the few facts have been given their due. The idea of a doubled Housman places him in the 1890s, at the moment of A Shropshire Lad, when the air was thick with such notions. But Housman Country refers the scholar-poet back to ...”

“... his loathing of the United States, which he didn’t visit until he was 55 and liked as little as he had expected. Back in 1943, he had written home of the possibility of ‘a war with our terrible enemy, America’. Fifty years later, at the time of the first Gulf War, he was arguing that much ‘of our present malaise arises from the abject ...”

“... in the party. Later still, he disowned socialism as the label for his beliefs, and spoke and wrote little about questions of economic inequality. Was this, as some of his critics alleged, to be explained largely in terms of his own increasing social and financial success, his obvious delight in the company of the moneyed and titled, and the waning of an ...”

“... disappeared amid the reverential gloom of Westminster Abbey on Coronation Day in 1953. The Queen, Arthur Bryant rhapsodised, was the foundation of British society; Churchill, in office once again, had greeted her father’s death the previous year with the words: ‘We stand erect both as an island people and as the centre of a worldwide Commonwealth and ...”

“... who deserved to live in dignity. ‘The future of the hemisphere did seem bright with hope,’ Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote after JFK announced the Alliance for Progress, which promised ‘homes, work and land, health and schools – techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuelas’. JFK ‘pronounced the Spanish manfully’, Schlesinger said, ‘but with a ...”