“... is not a young man … There runs through all he says and does that vein of irony by which we may so often mark one of life’s self-acknowledged failures … a man of parts without character and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he doesn’t need to. David Gates, the creator of these connoisseurs of disappointment and ...”

“... on they’ll be hard to stop. The Tate’s is the kind of show that sets one generalising. Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, wrote that it had managed ‘to take a non-subject (Picasso’s impact here was limited to a handful of artists) and turn it into a gripping indictment of British culture in the first half of the 20th ...”

“... agitated emotion and toning down many of its adventures, his translation is readable in a way that Richard Burton’s lurid and archaisising version, made fifty years later, is not. Lane expurgated, Burton fantasticated. There have been many wilful translations in the book’s history, a history that in its geographical, linguistic and picaresque range echoes ...”

“... apart in age and came from different worlds. Burke was born in Dublin in 1729, the second son of Richard, a Protestant lawyer of ‘fretful temper’, and Mary, daughter of a Catholic family from County Cork. Richard Burke was a harsh and unforgiving father, and rumours about cradle Catholicism dogged Edmund throughout his ...”

“... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...”

“... as ‘think’, ‘deem’, ‘reck’, ‘imagine’, ‘remember’ and ‘forget’. Actions may be straightforward, but the mental torture that produces them – and which they produce – isn’t. ‘The rest thou dost already know,’ the hero of The Giaour tells the friar who shrives him at the end of the story, ‘all my sins, and half my ...”

“... most of us did at school, is the world’s most perfect Desert Island Disc. To name it a classic may be beside the point. It is more like a myth or symbol that has got under the skin and into the secret memory of an astonishing number of readers and (above all) writers. Along with, say, Hamlet, the Ancient Mariner may be ...”

“... the bonus which distinguishes celebrity from fame? It depends on how you define perversion. There may be a link between shame and celebrity, but we know that there is a link between perversion and shame. Shame, or shaming, with its ostentatious morality, might be seen as a form of perversion in itself. Celebrity is often a ritual of public humiliation. Not ...”

“... Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series of maternal ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... office on 3 September proved to be, in Hunt’s words, a ‘dry hole’. Some months later, on 3 May 1972, on the orders of Colson, the White House arranged to fly some Cuban-American veterans of the Bay of Pigs to Washington from Miami. They were told that Ellsberg (now released on bail) would be attending an anti-war rally on the steps of the Capitol and ...”

“... of answered prayer. What a joy to hear from Mr Beggs of a £1,000 gift for the pulpit. Hallelujah! May that pulpit be the storm centre of the great hurricane of revival. Oh for a tempest of power, a veritable cyclone of blessing, Lord, let it come! Eight years later, the preacher rose up in that enormous pulpit and waved a copy of a historical study which had ...”

“... diver after all’s Done, still held fast in the weeds’ snare below ... My sudden struggle may have dragged down some White lily from the air – and now the fishes come. Meyers argues that the 20-year-old Frost chose the Dismal Swamp because other poets had written about it, and that Frost intended only to make a dramatic point to Elinor by ...”

“... bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my superannuated years,’ Styron muses in Selected Letters, edited by his widow with R. Blakeslee Gilpin. The irony of Styron’s career is that as a literary son of Faulkner, Wolfe and Hemingway, he expended massive energy and ...”

“... Revolutionary empire’ is a bold term which may be taken in various senses. Like the Roman and Arab before it, but on a grander scale, the British Empire was a powerful force in drawing peoples out of their separate existences, pulling the world together into one jarring and explosive whole. Its expansion had transforming effects on Britain itself, and through it on Europe ...”