“... and Dom Perignon ... Peter Whitehead married Dido Goldsmith, daughter of Teddy and niece of Sir James. I was Peter’s best man. Bianca Jagger was Dido’s best lady’); the Thatcherite on-yer-bike business memoirs (lists of flights, airport hotel massages, exotic sunsets, cockerels’ balls for dinner); jollies out East with the dictator-friendly ...”

“... be transformed by the existence of new science and new technologies. When Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in September 1939 and then prime minister in May 1940, he knew as little about science and technology as most other world leaders. But two things marked him out. He was an early nuclear visionary and he was mad keen on high-tech military ...”

“... one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching his ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... and censorious, with Mrs Patrick Campbell, and kept a kindness for scapegraces such as Lord Alfred Douglas and Frank Harris, in whose biography of Shaw the subject had interfered so heavily and helpfully. Being rationally opposed to the entire political, social and sexual order of the times, Shaw was professionally candid on subjects such as sex ...”

“... of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary ...”

“... 1788. It is the kind of subject that would inspire a less devious civilisation-chronicler like James Michener to epic slabs of narrative and at least two thousand pages, sweeping us from the formation of the continental land mass to Paul Hogan’s amber nectar ads. But Keneally habitually sidles into his big subjects, illuminating them indirectly by odd ...”

“... without a substantial) rank and file, and this could hardly be recruited in such a way. Lord Hugh Cecil once pointed out that’a class is in its very idea a separate thing with common interests,’ whereas ‘sex is just the opposite. Sex is a body whose members are essentially interested in the members of the other sex.’ British feminist leaders ...”

“... candidates for the roles of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, Tristan and Isolde, or Elektra: but now, as James Levine, the artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has notoriously complained, it is very hard to assemble a cast even for Aida. Nobody quite knows why this should be so: it could be the fault of teaching, it could be the merest freak of ...”

“... its potential adversaries, as well as courses on how to pick a dead drop and how not to look like James Bond, Suvorov was posted to Vienna, to that self-contained section of the Soviet Embassy called the Residency, which is headed by a GRU major-general invariably called ‘the Navigator’. He, as we learn from Shevchenko, can occupy quite a humble place in ...”

“... in McTaggart or Bradley. He broke loose from Hegelianism with the help first of William James and then of Russell, Moore and Alexander. But unlike Russell, Anderson did not emerge from his Hegelianism determined to deny whatever Hegel had asserted and to assert whatever Hegel had denied. He continued to respect Hegel – who was himself an ...”

“... And there would be those who would resist invasion: Bob Dylan (now clearly revealed as the Henry James of our age) not least. But the scene was set. The place: the Factory, Warhol’s studio, on East 47th Street. The fuel: hard drugs, especially amphetamines. The project: to condense the history of metropolitan interiors into a slow home movie, based on ...”

“... pen, but for those more comfortable with plain writing in English, it began perhaps with William James deriding the ‘copy theory of truth’. This path has been increasingly followed of late; its most widely-read exposition is Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. The will to truth disappears, and is replaced by a desire for more or less satisfactory ...”

“... Sol Kerzner, the multi-millionaire hotel/casino king (who was paying for the bash). Kerzner, the lord of Sun City and the Lost City, has now left the country amid a welter of long-standing but recently revived bribery and corruption charges. If at any previous point one had suggested that Slovo would cheerfully make his peace with casino-capitalism, the ...”

“... face, it was said, would rubberise itself into the shape of the spirit, who was, at various times, Lord Kitchener, Jack London or Franz Liszt (he came to tell the children to practise their instruments more frequently). But the barmy, scrambled upbringing wasn’t always innocent or even well-intentioned. Although Barnes later said that she loved her ...”