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“... a dossier on him or her. Mine is now in the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, and I can read it. I don’t know what it contains. Much irrelevant rubbish, no doubt: surveillance teams have to justify their expenses. But one thing I am prepared for: reports to the secret police by people I considered to be friends or at least friendly ...”

“... all he could do was to observe and write. He was a shrewd observer, and this book is a marvellous read. His account of Gladstone’s funeral, or of the Coronation, rivals Horace Walpole’s description of the obsequies of George II. ‘Chamberlain was very dapper indeed, George Curzon looks well again, Ritchie looks the wickedest of the human race ... as if ...”

“... Like many Francophiles, I’ve never read a book about Paris. Not a whole one, all the way through, anyway. Of course, I’ve bought enough of them, of every sort, and in some cases the hope of their being read has extended over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures ...”

“... Hanns Eisler records a meeting between Brecht and Zweig in London. Brecht, who ‘of course never read a line of Zweig’ (one admires the economy of effort), sees him only as a possible source of funds for his theatre; Zweig, no doubt, is interested only in adding the notch of another great man to his metaphorical bedpost. Brecht asks Eisler for a ...”

“... grace, called yourself one of art’s elect, then she would let you in on certain secrets: whom to read, how to gaze, what else there was to learn. Those who couldn’t feel it, those who lost the game, or didn’t see much worth winning, called her a phony and a fraud. Her failings are on display in these diaries. She had trouble feeling, sometimes, and being ...”

“... people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’* Beckett was in Paris when he read the essay. He wrote to McGreevy to say that he did ‘not think there is a syllable that needs touching’ in the first 18 pages, and that the rest, ‘though I do not find it quite as self-evident as the beginning, holds together perfectly’. But then he ...”

“... Anderson, another critic complained, Cather’s fiction was ‘harmless stuff that “could be read in schools and women’s clubs”’. Her Flaubertian classicism (and concomitant moral irony) went mostly unrecognised, and despite her huge popularity with general readers – her 1931 novel Shadows on the Rock was the most widely ...”

“... developed by Orton and Stoppard, cultural despair variously expressed – for instance, by Herbert Read and Kingsley Amis; and then to the sorts of things about which Appleyard enjoys talking, such as Brutalism and Pop Art. He does not neglect Russell, Ayer, Popper etc; he neglects very little. Indeed the quantity of material he doesn’t neglect is ...”

“... tournaments and the unromantic motives behind William’s quest for a rich wife. (Those who have read his article on ‘Youth in Aristocratic Society’, The Chivalrous Society, 1977, will find this part of the new book familiar.) One wonders whether Duby is right to insist that the life of knights was so different from that of the church clerks whom they ...”

“... the ceremony would be ‘inconvenient’. Senna, a young Brazilian woman told the Independent’s Richard Williams, ‘was our hero. Our only one.’ Senna’s triumph, like Pele’s before him, was to have beaten the North at one of its own games. And the North, angry Brazilians wanted to believe, had killed him. A million or so of Sao Paulo’s 15 million ...”

“... fortunes of evolutionary theory in the 1830s and 1840s, his densely-detailed narrative can also be read as a series of interrelated biographies – lives lived against a complex political and institutional background. Desmond’s argument is persuasive, and it can easily be extended, as he points out, in several directions. For example, in addition to offering ...”

“... an account of ‘the end of the brief era of dedicated Green national politics’ which cannot be read primarily as an exercise in historical explanation. Instead, it is a sharp polemic against Green parties and movements, developed by way of a genealogical history. Bramwell deploys a wide knowledge of contemporary thought and political life to give a ...”

“... still dressed in “couture” and the poor struggle along dismal pavements with little but C&A or Richard Shops to sustain them.’ The customers of C&A would surely be surprised to find themselves described as ‘the poor’ and most people expect to go along a pavement to get to the shops. Yet, despite her misplaced sympathy for the huddled masses in ...”

“... for books and articles accessed under ‘Nature’, it wouldn’t only be more refreshing to read, it would also be truer in its focus. His argument most often becomes threadbare when he has drawn only on ‘sources’ – not the wellsprings of rivers, but some book or other. In a chapter called ‘The World beyond Europe’ he puzzles over the lack of ...”

“... the advent of sustained war in and from the air. Edith Sitwell’s ‘Still falls the rain’ and Richard Eberhart’s ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’ overreach themselves in their attempts to find a rhetorical lift to match the fall of bombs. Keith Douglas was the best of the English Second World War poets because he managed to reconstitute traditional ...”