“... never the slightest suspicion of obscenity or profanity in the dialogue. Here again, no doubt, we may detect the hand of R.C. Sherriff, for Brickhill makes clear that Squadron Leader Guy Gibson was married, and that the men under his command had normal heterosexual interests. One of the neatest touches in the screenplay comes when Gibson and his chief bombing ...”

“... surpassed Britain’s by the early 20th century, the City remained the financial centre: ‘It may be that hides and rabbit skins are being sold from Australia to New York,’ one merchant banker wrote in 1914, ‘or coffee from Brazil to Hamburg, or eggs and butter from Siberia to London, or herrings from Aberdeen to Russia, or machinery from England to ...”

“... a 1970s TV comedy star, and there’s a life-size cardboard cut-out of him in the barn; in Spring, Richard makes TV documentaries; and the slow-dreaming, 104-year-old Daniel Gluck (whom we first met in Autumn and who returns in Summer – a man for all seasons) awakes from his reveries and returns to the present when he hears a song he wrote playing on the TV ...”

“... to the Turks, who were often denounced for degeneracy – swords, slippers and sexual excess, as Richard Cobden put it – the Arabs were often admired for manly simplicity. David Urquhart, secretary at the embassy in Constantinople, wrote that Islam was not a false religion to be ridiculed: it taught no new dogmas, propounded no fanciful revelation and ...”

“... that Shakespeare was trapped into marriage with Anne Hathaway and then cuckolded by his brother Richard. Hence the queen in Hamlet, adulterous with her brother-in-law, while Shakespeare plays the ghost; and hence Richard III, where sly Dick seduces Lady Anne. Perhaps the Joycean influence became unhelpful ...”

“... Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets ...”

“... the Trevelyan Lectures which he delivered at Cambridge in 1995 on the early Jacobean Parliaments. Richard Cust and Andrew Thrush calculate from internal evidence that the text now edited by them was written in the late 1990s. An expanded version of the lectures, now incorporating several additional chapters, King James VI and I and His English Parliaments ...”

“... than I have of the Norwegian context will no doubt discern other, local resonances. But it may be worth bearing in mind that the impact of the Nazi occupation on Norwegian society was especially deep. In trials that lasted from 1945 until 1957, more than 90,000 cases of collaboration were investigated (3.2 per cent of the country’s population was ...”

“... been imported into the Anglo-British state in the form of the Freedom of Information Act. But, as Richard Norton-Taylor’s pugnacious book shows, it’s a newborn right still struggling to survive against a centuries-old tradition of government.The structure of the ‘British’ state is still essentially monarchical. Constitutionally, the rest of the ...”

“... a simple visceral response to a preserved penis in a jar, then we should have talked because there may have been room for manoeuvre. Who knows, if the contents of the preserving-jar had been shrouded in murky liquid, its contents only to be glimpsed and guessed at, if it had been seen, once Maisie had broken the jar open, as undifferentiated grey tissue on ...”

“... state is treating stupidity not as an evil but as a valuable commodity, the production of which may be encouraged in order to increase revenue, as though stupidity were a good in its own right. There is no attempt here, as there is in the case of cigarettes, to balance the amount of money raised against the merits of the behaviour which allows the money to ...”

“... the group included Stephen Cambone, Lawrence Di Rita, William Luti and, on a part-time basis, Richard Perle, who chaired the Defense Policy Board. Several of them had had a hand in rebuilding the armed forces, kicking the Vietnam syndrome, and winning the Cold War in the 1980s in the service of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. They had, in their own ...”

“... is the second big virtue of the book, to match its anecdotal interest. (The selection was made by Richard Stott, who sadly died on 30 July; I suspect it is he who should get the credit for shaping the story.) It is the account of how Blair fell in love with his own certainty and sense of conviction. In Campbell’s early years working with him there are three ...”

“... Office’s chief legal adviser. Corps Diplomatique?). According to D.C., ‘although the reader may, on closing the book, ask himself what is the good of it all from a practical point of view, he cannot but admire the extraordinary patience and erudition of Dr Goebel in having gathered together such a mass of interesting historical material.’ But ...”

“... and horrible. Few people, after all, think about philosophers much, and some of those who do may well regard them with a mildly bemused respect. But the subject does collect a familiar style of complaint: that philosophy gets no answers, or no answers to any question that any grown-up person would worry about, or no answer which would be worth worrying ...”