“... their fanciful pedigrees (they boasted of founders ranging from the first Pope Gregory to King Arthur), they adopted fancy ways of living, which involved long stays in Edinburgh and London and mounting expenditure on food, wine and clothes. In Devine’s words, the chiefs were attempting ‘to live in the style of 18th-century gentlemen on the meagre ...”

“... from the CIA and revived his skills as an infantryman. He was surprised to discover that, with a little experience, you can usually tell from the sound when a bullet is coming directly at you. From walking around up to his neck in flooded marshes he caught hepatitis. In mid-summer 1967, after he had recovered somewhat, he left Vietnam and returned to ...”

“... usually also the interesting stuff, gets muffled. In the course of a conversation about Freud with Arthur Koestler, Orwell said: ‘When I lie in my bath in the morning, which is the best moment of the day, I think of tortures for my enemies.’ I sometimes do that too: being helpless in the bath is the best moment to indulge horrible fantasies of retributory ...”

“... Independence​ was handed to Ceylon’s elite on a platter. ‘Think of Ceylon as a little bit of England,’ Oliver Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said. This was a point of pride. Don Stephen Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, remarked: ‘There has been no rebellion in Ceylon, no non-cooperation movement and no fifth column ...”

“... Young Fritz, too, came to feel for the first time that he was not ‘Aryan’, a word that had had little resonance before. He knew nothing of his Jewish origins until his father’s severe lecture after he directed an anti-semitic remark at his sister. Then the seven-year-old began to learn who he was, or at least who he was considered to be by the new ...”

“... candidate at Harvard, ‘he would bludgeon, set traps, ambush and trip up. His manner, which did little to disguise that he thought he was cleverer than most people, left many of his interlocutors feeling bruised.’ Relentless combativeness became his signature style of argument throughout his career. And when he was at his most powerful, as national ...”

“... Then he went on: ‘I met him in Paris several times. He was a morose, completely self-contained little man. I was curious about him. I admired certain aspects of his work.’ He told another interviewer that he had letters from Joyce, ‘who asked me some years ago to make some confidential inquiries on business and related matters … I don’t think it ...”

“... naivety and provincialism. They did not recognise the authority of Christian tradition and had little interest in Jewish tradition, though the incomparably dramatic but morally unaccountable Hebrew Bible probably shaped their temperament more than they liked to admit. They wanted to stop sounding like their relatives; they wanted an end to softness and ...”

“... pressure, Zukerman lost his job as a New York correspondent for the London-based Jewish Chronicle. Arthur Lourie, the Israeli consul general in New York, exulted in his firing: ‘a real MITZVAH’.Zukerman wasn’t alone. In 1953, the American Reform rabbi Morris Lazaron recited a prayer of atonement in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, declaring ‘we have ...”

“... pro and con. We had to do a fair amount of that.You weren’t encouraged, as we were, to go in for little whimsical Charles Lamb-like essays? Writing trivia about trivia?No. The senior English master was a raging Leavisite, an absolute caricature.Had he been to Cambridge?No, he’d been to Southampton and had been thoroughly instructed there by a ...”

“... achievement and we mean to build on it.’ (And on the other side of the argument, there’s Arthur Scargill: ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your ability to master words.’) The fact that Prescott minds being teased about this gives his touchiness a tragicomic edge. The accounts of early slights, almost ...”

“... to be implemented and that it was to be implemented quickly. The words of the US representative Arthur Goldberg were the ‘resolution is for implementation’, and on behalf of his government he pledged that ‘our diplomatic and political influence will be exerted ... to achieve a fair and equitable settlement so that all in the area may live in ...”

“... has emerged in the twenty years since the death of Hubert Fichte, gay fiction is considered to be little better than a joke, usually a dirty one; there may or may not be a more pronounced homophobia in Germany than in other European countries, but I suspect the differences are more reasonably attributed to the fortuitous absence of ‘out’ gay novelists of ...”

“... to have a laugh. But he could have gone further.We know Ignatius Gallaher best from the story ‘A Little Cloud’ in Dubliners. He is a journalist in London back in Dublin for a brief visit. Gallaher is unmarried, he has a ‘travelled air, well-cut tweed suit and fearless accent’. He wears ‘a vivid orange tie’, calls the Dublin waiter garçon and ...”

“... to be manifest in daily life. Even a city boy like me can see evidence that the world is a little warmer than it was. Part of the problem is one of scale. Global warming is as a subject so much more important than almost anything else that it is difficult to frame or discuss. At the moment there is a global warming-related item on the news at least ...”