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“... for you and me, with no more than a window-shopper’s interest, to know about Jeffrey Dahmer? Brian Masters says yes, not only is it useful, it is vital to examine this human being in detail, because he is one of us. I suppose the world divides into those who look and those who look away. Looking away is easiest, of course, because it requires no ...”

“... between sex and death to deliver him and them into such a mess of evil. In Killing for Company Brian Masters attempts, with the active participation of his subject, to explain how a person like Nilsen came to be; how his necrophiliac fantasies invaded real life; how, in Masters’s words, it is possible to wake up ...”

“... when any of them stepped out of line: forgiveness is ‘unbiological’ apparently, non-Darwinian. Brian Masters’s book arrived at Easter, and its title – there on the dust-jacket on top of a sepia study of Aspinall kissing a tiger – may have been awarded a religious meaning. Did it refer to the saviour of the biosphere, who has had his ...”

“... in wartime Berlin to The Pillar of Cloud, Redemption and The Flowering Cross. Ten years earlier Brian O’Nolan, alias Flann O’Brien, had written At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman. These two works, of which only the first was published in the author’s lifetime, differ from those of Beckett and Stuart in many ways, not least in the ...”

“... The galleries were paid for by Lord Duveen of Millbank, energetic and ingenious purveyor of Old Masters to the grandest industrialists and financiers of North America, and in turn to US and Canadian museums. The Asset Strippers slyly points to the contemporary reliance of art museums on private sponsorship, shadowy assets and investments. All of this risks ...”

“... magazines, notably the New Yorker, have welcomed the talents of John McGahern, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Edna O’Brien and Benedict Kiely, among others, one could give long odds against a manuscript by an unknown Irish novelist or poet seeing the light of first publication in Boston or in New York.So it’s back to London and the old Anglo-Irish ...”

“... novel that is so avowedly in thrall to writers its narrator keeps gauchely referring to as his ‘masters’. (Channelling both Tolstoy and Nabokov, he muses: ‘All photo albums are unhappy, in the words of the old master, in their own particular way.’) It manifests especially in a tendency to decorate a perfectly felicitous metaphor with unnecessary ...”

“... that the most reliable ones were ‘the least worrying’. One person thoroughly vindicated is Dr Brian Jones, the sidelined MOD analyst who complained at the time about the tabloidisation of the intelligence material, not least its repeated use of what even George Tenet, in the days when he was still hanging onto his job as head of the CIA, is quoted in ...”

“... are storming one of the last bastions of progressive education. So runs the latest episode in what Brian Cox terms ‘the great betrayal’: the betrayal of teachers and their pupils over the last thirty years by government interference, false ideologies and starvation of resources. The current cast of this depressing production seems to have wandered off the ...”

“... to the Arthurian story, and a major concern is the history of the Templars, whose legendary Grand Masters were to Languedoc and Provence what Arthur is to Wessex. One aspect of Durrell’s ambiguous Grail consists – as befits a banned author of the Thirties and a former associate of Henry Miller – of ‘love-lore’ or the secrets of sex. These, which ...”

“... as misses, and both focus attention on one of the central problems of modern British politics. Brian Sedgemore’s is by far the sillier and more dangerous of the two, but it is also more entertaining and politically the more significant. Mr Sedgemore was Labour MP for Luton in the last Parliament, when he was probably the most intelligent member of the ...”

“... with a lantern jaw and a hand on the ladle of the public trough, versus another. When the new man, Brian Mulroney, appeared on the screens in the small hours, waving in ragged colour from a hockey auditorium in his home town, Baie Comeau, Quebec, there were ripples of mockery in Canada House. Canada is a difficult country to govern and the electorate seemed ...”

“... economy.’ Goldman goes so far as to speak of ‘the basic irrationality of the party of the masters bidding for, and winning, the votes of the organised working class’, and Giacomo Beccattini claims that Fawcett’s ‘uncompromising individualism identified his position more and more with those of the middle classes’. Yet this is surely to ignore ...”

“... it’s a variation of flavour rather than a difference between species. Guy Davenport, one of the masters of essay form, wrote two sparkling pieces a year apart on table manners, one for the Hudson Review in 1979, the other for Antaeus in 1980. Shockingly, there is no overlap between them, though cannibalising your own material is generally regarded as ...”

“... dedicated to preserving the authority of the canon, and to parading a spectacular array of great masters and great masterpieces in a ‘pure’ space, cocooned from the gross, corrupt world of politics, ideology and social strife. Monographs and surveys are still published today in great numbers, of course; and there remain large parts of the discipline ...”