“... been that first impressions deceive, that beneath the angular features and the schoolmarm manner may, perhaps, lie a less mannish sweetness, denied to the camera in scene after scene. So bony is her prose style that the same tantalising process is visited on the reader, and as on screen, alternating the terse and the yielding, she seduces us. Over the erotic ...”

“... affection for that uncomplicated scoundrel is foolish. The Hogg view of his Tory colleagues may not be backed by much detail, but we get the message. Maudling was a lightweight, Macleod a first-rater, Edward Boyle is rightly adored, Margaret Thatcher did right by Quintin and so, despite differences, should be seen as a good thing. There are ...”

“... in Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book. In the new ones, however accomplished and diverting they may be, the meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions; although the examples sought out by Alison Lurie have as much cunning and high spirits in them as the old tales. In Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Tale’ (1982) it takes us a few pages ...”

“... actually made two documentaries with the help of the KGB. The first, Comrade Philby, went out in May 1990. The second, Strange Neighbours, about the American spy couple, Peter and Helen Kroger, who acted as a communications link between London and Moscow for Gordon Lonsdale and the Portland spy-ring, went out in November 1991. Both were co-productions, in ...”

“... one of the nurses, says I might be able to go carrying the drain heavily disguised by a shawl. I may be on television as it is the launch of a famous person’s book. When they’ve gone I read the Observer. There’s a two-page spread on breast cancer. ‘If three or more lymph glands are affected, 30 per cent of women survive for ten years.’ I don’t ...”

“... cent our fathers – no getting away from that. Thank you very much, Mendel, Crick and Watson. We may deny genetic destiny, and speak contemptuously of reductionism, but I suspect that the nature half of the nature/nurture debate troubles us deeply and perpetually, like a grumbling appendix. You can only hold onto the fantasy of turning out to be a foundling ...”

“... with Burke; at the very least, as David Bromwich proposes in quite another context, they may have to embrace a Burkean language but wrest it to non-Burkean ends. This means that the relationship with ‘New Historicism’ and its marxisant traditions will inevitably be uneasy. When Harrison notices a human dwelling-place in Constable’s Study of the ...”

“... As in Catholic and Protestant homes, the aim was to facilitate the passage of the dead (‘May the angels take thee into paradise’) and to comfort the grief-stricken through familiar rituals that imposed order on the chaos of loss. Psychologists, psycho-historians, sociologists and cultural anthropologists have all weighed in on the meaning of these ...”

“... claim of being a gentleman. In upholding McCarthyism while he was in Washington, for example, he may well have had to meet objections from his superiors at the Times, but he can hardly be said to have occupied a position of signal isolation or courage. Yet he writes as if his prejudice took nerve. Similarly, he describes making a scene at the house of Brian ...”

“... incidentally, the less they suggest the kind of Heart of Darkness-incarnate savagery that we may secretly yearn to ascribe to them. Toasting the engagement of the BBC’s man in the region, Roger Hearing, with a bottle of champagne which, a proud best man, I had resourcefully procured one night, I swallowed hard as he told me of witnessing killings at ...”

“... kind of battle with the Hollywood system. Given Ingrid Bergman’s own circumstances, she may have been thinking of his marital adventures. Soon after his father’s death in 1919, he married Catherine Hessling, one of Pierre-Auguste’s models. He began to make films as a showcase for her talents (or at least, ambitions) and their marriage broke down ...”

“... beef market would fall.’ There’s a lesson floating around in One to Count Cadence, though it may be too late and too caustic for digestion so many years, illegal arms-deals and political scandals alter the Vietnam War. ‘You didn’t like killing those cats.’ says Private First-Class Joe Morning to his protagonist Sgt Krummel, ‘but something inside ...”

“... words, quite literally provided lustre. The proposal is convincing about Memling’s career. It may be, as Israel proposes, that art history is, or should be, ‘essentially an adjunct of history itself’. But what sort of an account of paintings would be offered under such a regime? The pun on lustre – in painting and in the social world – speaks to ...”

“... this is a book written under a peculiarly taxing constraint. To do without the letter e in English may be marginally more difficult than to do without it in French. Perec was denied the use of some invaluable linguistic forms: je, se, le, ce, elle, de, les, des, avec, après, quel, que, est: the list is potentially very long, and frightening. Written ...”

“... influence good. He hardly recognises – strange in a historian of refugees – that isolation may be necessary and justified; and that it might lead to more important contributions either to scholarship or to public life than immediate acceptance. He seems oblivious to the fact that ‘influence’ does not stand outside history. His brief discussion of ...”