“... it with another, to the cock of his head and the play of his eyebrows and his wide mouth, which said much that he declined to put into words. But the thing I carried away at the end of two hours was the way his person, so focused and unhurried, and his style of thinking had fused over the previous thirty years. When we met I knew nothing about intelligence ...”

“... as he jumped out of a jeep at Los Alamos base camp. His friend and fellow physicist Isidor Rabi said: ‘I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car … his walk was like High Noon … this kind of strut. He had done it.’ His colleague Enrico Fermi ‘seemed shrunken and aged, made of old parchment’ by comparison. Yet his euphoria passed, and ...”

“... these are among the topics considered in Getting and Spending, although in justice it has to be said that its substance is primarily devoted to the aggregate growth of that expenditure and to the fascinating recent history of attempts to plan and control it. But even if we make such allowances, the book provides only superficial answers to most of the ...”

“... even went down without a degree. However, he had another side and is remembered in the fifth of Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’.) Arnold exhausted the patience of tutors, lounging back and refusing to take notes. Naturally he did not take a First in Schools. How could he, cramming three years of reading into a like number of weeks? The family was ...”

“... Louvain. He disliked drinking with the college fellows, though, and was running into trouble with Edward Lee, who, despite his friendship with More, was becoming one of Erasmus’s harshest critics. In 1518 Erasmus left Louvain for Basle to see his revised New Testament through the press. Illnesses, quarrels, deaths, friendships ... life went on as ...”

“... most women of her milieu, she was taught some Chinese and Buddhist classics, and these she was said to have learned much more quickly than her brother, who was being trained for a political career. This made her father lament the fact that she was not a man. After a few years of marriage she became a widow, and then served as court lady to the Empress. Her ...”

“... had forfeited that blessing.’ This took some nerve. Baxter remarks that he had thoughtfully said ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘King Charles’ for prudential reasons: ‘I was fain to speak of the species of government only, for they had lately made it treason by a law to speak for the person of the king.’ Really, C.H. Sisson ought to have appreciated ...”

“... pacifists (‘put the lot behind barbed wire’), bureaucrats, brass hats and blimps. In 1940 Edward Hulton, the proprietor of Picture Post, said that Cudlipp was an uncomfortable sort of young man to meet. He is a revolutionary. I don’t mean he is filled up with a stock of ballyhoo about Karl Marx, or that he ...”

“... rumour at Louth in October 1536 were duly enforced in the reigns of Henry VIII’s children Edward and Elizabeth. So much for the events. But it is the interpretation of the events which has generated a small shelf’s worth of books and articles on the subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of which Hoyle’s is only the latest, if the most ...”

“... ten minutes or so – or when you are going to trace an outline, to obtain the assistance of the said Prince … to hold up your tracing to the wall … it is very polite … but rather embarrassing.’ Albert couldn’t win. He was either a parasite or he interfered. When things went wrong he was blamed and Victoria was not unjustified in feeling that he ...”

“... only to be brought down by his political opponents on a charge of corruption. It used to be said that there was no connection between Bacon’s intellectual life and his public career. Macaulay set the pattern for this interpretation in an essay of 1837, in which he praised Bacon’s philosophy as forward-looking, but condemned his moral character and ...”

“... by Henry Mortlock, whose success was founded on multiple editions year after year of the works of Edward Stillingfleet, beginning in 1661 with his Irenicum, which attacked Nonconformism as entirely without justification. As Stillingfleet rose through the established Church eventually to become Bishop of Worcester, Mortlock rose with him to become Master of ...”

“... and it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first leader of his party to have fitted carpets. White Heat contains a comprehensive collection of George Brown stories, although the best one remains the incident when the worse-for-wear foreign secretary was rejected by a ...”

“... proven reality. It’s just silliness among the signifiers. Stevenson’s book is, it should be said in fairness, a massive gathering of painful erudition. He is like Denys the Alexandrian, who in Flaubert’s account received orders from heaven to read every book in the world. His head must be dizzy with the minor works of Julian Mitchell and Francis King ...”

“... and what he is reading and wants to read. Yeats and Rilke dominate the talk of poetry. Edward Thomas, the figure behind the best poems in Raiders’ Dawn, is not mentioned. Lewis asks: ‘Will you copy for me Yeats’s poem “Solomon and the Witch” from the red Weekend Book … When I found it on the last morning I realised how much I needed ...”