“... Or rather, it resolves them by adopting a pose of wry detachment. Looking back from 1936 at that young and callow infantry officer, the author can allow himself the luxury of mockery. Yet in 1917 matters had been very different. What the Diaries record is the muddle of a man who chose an identity and then found that he could not function within it. Infantry ...”

“... ideology’ existing in some significant relation to the social and political mood of the time. Robert Conquest’s anthology came out in 1956, the year of Suez, so the ‘ideology’ must have been formed during the administrations of Churchill and Eden. The first Attlee Government carried out the programme enthusiastically endorsed by the troops in ...”

“... but her farcical mother, having arranged the match, prevents its consummation, and the hero, the young writer, sleeps with her on the wedding night. Then they go off to Europe, leaving the husband behind. The love-relationship is serious and silly, passionate and tedious. The writer remembers from Chekhov’s notebook the saying that love is ‘either a ...”

“... with his thin paw & swiftly absorbing 3 or 4 large lumps of cake in succession. At home he looks young and rompish at the meeting, at Hunts meeting he looked old and ungainly, but his power & eloquence as a speaker were homeric. But I said at the time that but for his speaking he was in appearance like a cross between a fiend and a tallow ...”

“... George Ignatieff and his eldest brother had wanted to write the family history but one died quite young and the other was too busy. Their parents, Michael Ignatieff’s grandparents, wrote (unpublished) memoirs of their own lives, his a dry public document, hers a jumble of memories, written in English for her grandchildren to read. They died in ...”

“... was becoming increasingly irritated by her continued seclusion at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral, a young, clever, radical MP named George Otto Trevelyan published a pamphlet which had the effrontery to ask: ‘What does she do with it?’ Where, Trevelyan wanted to know, was all the money going which the Queen was paid by the Government for the sole purpose of ...”

“... or nurture – the pelican (not the first in Rego’s work) pierces its breast to feed its young – but the dynamic is sexual. The girl and bird are posed at an angle. Jane’s eyes are closed and her mouth stretched wide; she is needy, greedy, pained or ecstatic, the embrace a nightmare of assault or a dream of sustenance, perhaps salvation. Jane is ...”

“... don’t speak any foreign languages, I don’t like foreigners,’ to which Churchill replied: ‘Young man, these all seem to me to be positive advantages.’ When Eden was dealing with the Indo-China crisis in Geneva, holding the French by one hand while holding off the hawkish Dulles with the other (‘The trouble with you, Foster,’ Eden told him, ‘is ...”

“... remained one of Evelyn’s friends for most of his life. He also enjoyed what was called, after Robert Boyle had popularised the term, ‘seraphick love’ with Anne Russell (whom he dubbed ‘Platona’) and Elizabeth Carey (who became his ‘Electra’). It is exceptionally hard to describe what Evelyn felt for these women: probably it is best to say that ...”

“... writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs ...”

“... that helped the Khmer Rouge seize power, is not mentioned. When the foreign co-prosecutor, Robert Petit, a Canadian, suggested bringing more individuals to trial, his Cambodian co-prosecutor reportedly blocked him. In June Petit announced that he was resigning for ‘personal reasons’, but officials who follow the proceedings closely believe he was ...”

“... whether it is Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer or the latest colour-mag line-up of the Best of Young British Novelists. Who’s new, who’s hot, who’s good, who’s not going to cut the mustard? The critical triage starts immediately. I remember lining up with my fellow Young Novelists of 1983, and after we had left ...”

“... the work of composition’. Initially at least, theatre wasn’t his main interest: the ambitious young provincial was determined to establish himself as a literary poet, for whom print and court patronage would be the key to success. Catering for the popular tastes of playhouse audiences was something he, like many of his playwright contemporaries, might ...”

“... of writers resist, or try to resist, the by now familiar and formulaic portrait of the artist as a young child: in Thomas’s case, intimidating, overbearing father, worshipped abject mother and sensitive child who only becomes the best version of himself in his writing. Thomas’s life as a boy was nearly half his life – he was killed at 39 – and Wilson ...”

“... what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself’, Gilbert Ryle said of the young Bernard Williams, ‘and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your sentence’. Williams’s declared enemies in philosophy – ‘reactionaries’ who sweep ...”