“... to death. The 415 pages of this anthology won’t kill you – nor will you go blind – but you may from time to time feel queasy. An anthology of sex is something of a bathhouse, back-alley enterprise. Here are passages without antecedent or consequence, brief, sometimes anonymous; sometimes gratifying enough, in a casual sort of way. Writing about sex is ...”

“... Not long ago I, too, was browsing in the Huntingdon files and found a large box of letters from Robert Conquest to Amis; the other side of the correspondence was missing, and what was there contained lots of limericks and few confessional items for the use of any future biographer of Conquest, possibly Salwak. It seemed somehow a slightly dingy way of ...”

“... world is instead part of a vast game played by no fixed rules. The continuity between our cultures may thus hinder a proper appreciation of Greek science. The solution, Lloyd proposes, is for the history of Greek science to be carried out only in the context of careful comparison with other societies’ science: not in order to show how one is superior but to ...”

“... for the Performing Arts and the New York Historical Society. Long fascinated by the events of 10 May 1849, I couldn’t leave Manhattan without making a pilgrimage to Astor Place. But I could find no memorial to the 26 people killed in one of New York’s bloodiest episodes; nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the ...”

“... now I live in Washington and I see the old Rhodes Class of those years going about its business: Robert Reich running the Labour Department and Strobe Talbott managing US-Russian relations from Foggy Bottom and Ira Magaziner trying to recover from his moment as person-in-charge of Bill and Hillary’s health care ‘reform’.When I want to recall those ...”

“... vulgar utilitarians and then march off to found a rival church.’ Among the Luthers they placed Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins is the wunderkind of pre-Sixties American higher education. In fact, as Kerr foresaw, he may well be among the last of a type for a very long time. For about a hundred years, if not ...”

“... amatory and alcoholic excess. We never quite got the hang of each other, code-wise. I think he may have been disappointed at my failure to respond in kind with ‘Hey, ma MAN!’ or ‘You betchar-ASS!’, professional courtesies not often heard by the banks of the Trent. For my part, I had some difficulty in understanding his general observations on life ...”

“... No one recovers from the sadomasochism of their childhood. We may not want to think of the relations between parents and children as power relations: indeed it may sound like a perversion of parenting to do so. And we don’t want to think of parents and children being in any way sexually gratified by their status in relation to each other ...”

“... is going on. First, there is a diligent detailed realism, essential in spite of whatever Pellerin may say. Time, place, action, clothes, food, dialogue and much more are reported – recreated – with impeccable, mildly obsessive care. Second, this approach is frequently, subtly invaded by moments of subjectivity or impressionism: we are seeing not what an ...”

“... their ability to reason, appraise, act and participate. Seeing people in terms only of their needs may give us a rather meagre view of humanity.To use a medieval distinction, we are not only patients, whose needs demand attention, but also agents, whose freedom to decide what to value and how to pursue it can extend far beyond the fulfilment of our needs. The ...”

“... two women to be admitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the Rising was suppressed, Robert, her father, narrowly escaped the firing squad, and was in Lewes Prison when Maeve was born. Her childhood was punctuated by raids from ‘unfriendly men dressed in civilian clothes carrying revolvers’; they were looking for her father, who was often on ...”

“... economically in the words ‘uncouth of speech’. The relentlessly reader-friendly translation by Robert Fitzgerald departs from the usual reading to say the Carians were led by their chief ‘in their own tongue’. Robert Fagles, whose version aims at an idiomatic directness lacking in Lattimore, without the sacrifice of ...”

“... the conflict as simply a war for Southern independence, and celebrate the grandeur of its heroes. Robert E. Lee was an Olympian figure, always described as ‘magnificent’ by English visitors, and Stonewall Jackson was a martyr – to what it was not clear. Jackson’s death evoked an outpouring of sympathy and admiration from the entire British ...”

“... foe in Soviet communism. Buckley strutted the campus as a full-time anti-communist impresario. Robert Silvers, a Yale contemporary who later became the editor of the New York Review of Books, told Tanenhaus that Buckley ‘was so superior, so commanding’. He kept an aeroplane near the campus and employed a secretary to assist him as editor of the Yale ...”

“... yielded the poorest literature. With the exception of two lucid studies of its foundation, Robert Hildebrand’s Dumbarton Oaks (1990) and Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation (2003), each the work of a serious diplomatic historian, little or nothing of analytic interest exists about the organisation, which has proved an intellectual sink-hole, down ...”