“... exploits with military trains and Clay was ordered to cool it. The British Foreign Secretary was Ernest Bevin, with the reputation of ‘a fixer and shrewd horse-trader’. His dislike of the Germans (‘I tries ’ard ... but I ’ates them’) had come about, we are told, ‘not as the result of Nazism and the war, but because he could never forgive the ...”

“... personification of absolute perfection. Cicely: I think your frankness does you great credit, Ernest. If you will allow me, I will copy your remarks into my diary. Alma did just that; and she, too, was very keen on frankness and openness, and proud of her own: some of her ripostes in the conversations she gleefully records are frank to the point of ...”

“... to reflect as follows at a moment of crisis: ‘He dismissed the idea of a telegram. “Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf” was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and his aunt would think it was a code message to which he had omitted to give her the key.’ Only a man steeped in the nuances of aristocratic life could have invented a name ...”

“... will just about keep Ann in asparagus over Coronation week, and I am praying that something may be forthcoming from one of the reprint societies, or the films, to offset my meagre returns from what has turned out to be a successful book. There are a few letters to the Flemings’ more famous friends (Somerset Maugham, Claudette Colbert, their Jamaica ...”

“... two and three if you find yourself in difficulties.’ This tutorial tone, kept up throughout, may make some readers feel that he underestimates them. Certainly one keeps expecting to come upon the sort of informative illustrations that this theme, when popularised, conventionally needs: they would depict, say, a detail from Holman Hunt’s The Finding of ...”

“... their convictions, all but one were quickly amnestied by the Paris government. Its attitude may have been influenced by the fact that the French army had carried out many more recent mass killings of civilians in the course of suppressing revolts in Algeria (1945) and Madagascar (1947), and was even then committing massacres in Indochina, still a French ...”

“... physics and Oppenheimer was theoretically inclined. Aiming high, he applied to work with Ernest Rutherford. Rejected, he turned to Patrick Blackett, a glamorous experimenter whom contemporaries described as ‘a young Oedipus’. Oppenheimer was miserable, near collapse, bedevilled by sexual frustration and academic anxieties. He lacked the practical ...”

“... mind. He is growing into himself. ‘We have a bunch of dandy fellows in our unit,’ he writes in May 1918, ‘and are going to have a wonderful time.’ There has never been a more self-conscious ‘soldier’ in the history of literature. From New York: It was funny yesterday when we donned our uniforms. We put them on yest aft and went to supper and then ...”

“... Everything becomes more difficult, however, when we move to the level of the sentence. It may be nonsense to call a particular word ‘true’, but most people believe that sentences may be true or false. The account given of ‘sentence truth’, however, may itself be either ...”

“... to overcome them – although they are also that. The papers show, as much as they discuss, what may be involved in the idea of the responsibilities of intellectuals. The papers by Eastern and Western writers are very different in tone and concern – and who would be surprised? Most of the Eastern European writers take for granted that intellectuals have ...”

“... to begin with what it is not. The theory of kinds denies – I am adapting some words used by Ernest Gellner for a rather different purpose – that literature ‘reveals to us from some kind of mysterious and totally unbounded reservoir of possible experiences or impressions, this or that set of items which then also occasionally arrange themselves’ as ...”

“... other major French writer of that century or this; even Zola, stodgy, paunchy bourgeois though he may have been, at least pitchforked himself into the Dreyfus Affair. But Stendhal never really brought off anything – except, of course, the novels. We watch him drifting and coasting along, dependent on high-placed, energetic patrons like the aforementioned ...”

“... theft and false accounting. (The judges in the Court of Appeal released one of those defendants, Ernest Saunders, after ten months of his five-year prison sentence because he had been diagnosed with incurable Alzheimer’s. He later made medical history with a complete recovery. Who was bamboozled there?) Despite the support of heavyweight figures including ...”

“... She pulled meaning out of repose – ‘what she gives us is a sort of sculpture in transition,’ Ernest Newman wrote – and may be more truly grouped with Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse (Duncan and Duse were close friends, possibly lovers). Certainly modern dance, which arguably begins with Duncan and is like a torch ...”

“... were mounted by bookmakers and publicans, who might otherwise have been organising ratting pits. Ernest Hemingway, it seems, became so excited by the six-day bicycle races in post-1918 Paris that he could not bring himself to read the proofs of A Farewell to Arms. The Tour de France went from one excess to another. It is puzzling to read that the competitors ...”