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“... One of the many welcome aspects of Gorbachev’s glasnost is that it has made possible a mutual East-West re-examination of the twists and turns in the record of Cold War conflict and confrontation. Last February, for example, there was a gathering in Moscow of top-level participants in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, from both the White House and the Kremlin: they were meeting to discuss how those events unfolded in each capital, and how decisions were made on each side, almost minute by minute ...”

“... studies. That the traditional approach has by no means been exhausted is shown by the biography by Don Cook, a journalist on the Los Angeles Times. It is still possible, and some would say still desirable, to write about the General using the same evidence and the same anecdotes that have already been used by scores of other writers. As the music-hall ...”

“... Don’t​ talk about God – be it! Find the place, the formula … Ah, Larry, it isn’t that life is so short, it’s that it’s everlasting!’ Henry Miller wrote to Lawrence Durrell in 1959. The formula, if one were to look to history for clues, seems fairly simple. Be white, male, fairly imposing in stature, and in possession of a large ship and obedient crew ...”

“... Was toasted and had toast named after it, And now the audience is here. Out on the harbour Captain Cook IIjam-packed with Japanese, Their Nikons crackling like automatic flak, Goes swanning past the well-remembered line Where the submarine nets were when I was young, Forty years ago – i.e. a full Fifth of the time Port Jackson’s had that name. And after ...”

“... Adventure arrived on the north coast of Tahiti. For some on board, including their captain, James Cook, this was a return visit to the Pacific haven they called ‘King George’s Island’. The British were there, among other reasons, to check the performance of a small jewelled watch, barely more than five inches in diameter, carried with them all the way ...”

“... the ideals of wholesome American family life and the purity of the Virgin. Betty Draper and Don Draper, with their children, in season three of ‘Mad Men’. We don’t need to have watched the previous forty episodes of the series (out of 85 aired so far, with another seven still to go) to guess that this tableau ...”

“... stage.’ Even the duns the postman brought him in later life cannot have been worse than that. Don Locke has been sufficiently amused by the life and impressed by the philosophy to try to forge the two together in a ‘philosophical biography’. An academic philosopher himself, he regards Godwin’s one formally philosophic book, Political Justice, as by ...”

“... and on the seventh he flew to Australia. Athletic Park, April 1959: a southerly straight off Cook Strait, the microphone bandaged in gauze. Here in Balclutha there is quiet sunshine and we sit on the grass, waiting for the voice over the landline. Our togs are back on the bus. We have been promised a swim afterwards. Come forward. You come. * Thus in the ...”

“... Paris, so that by tale’s end Sheherazade’s sister, Dunyazade (nightly asnooze beneath the bed, don’t forget), is the only comely maiden remaining in the entire realm. Realism in The Arabian Nights is reserved for other things; food, for instance, such as the pomegranate-seed dish (preserved in almonds and sweet julep and flavoured with cardamom and ...”

“... the temptation of suicide. ‘Just because you have pessimistic thoughts,’ Camus replied, ‘you don’t have to act pessimistic … One has to pass the time somehow. Look at Don Juan.’A few days before the New Yorker profile appeared, he met Patricia Blake, a 20-year-old intern at Vogue. He didn’t think much of her ...”

“... for reasons that had nothing to do with the words. One is reminded of the joke about the Oxford don, heard walking across the quad, intently saying to his interlocutor, ‘Ninthly’. There is an important difference between Cromer’s inability to select detail and his creator’s inability, but at times the two sicknesses coincide. There are dull ...”

“... if his isn’t the look of wisdom, then where will we ever encounter it? – but poise and acuity don’t seem bound up, necessarily, with an ethics (or metaphysics) of penetration. Is this a man who has ‘seen through’ anyone? What’s more difficult: seeing through, or deep inside, the people who surround you, or seeing them in a way that stops at the ...”

“... as ringleader: ‘That was the original Jacobean banister,’ protests a scandalised left-wing don. In The Russian Interpreter, which is set in Moscow, the ineffable Proctor-Gould attaches himself to Manning on the basis of their brief acquaintanceship ‘at John’s’. The Englishman abroad cannot resist such claims. ‘We come from similar ...”

“... has less orthodox uses, too. In a memoir written with her friend and fellow activist Betty Cook, Anne Scargill recalls attending a debate over the relative merits of nuclear power and coal with her husband, Arthur, president of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1981 to 2002. The scientist who was arguing for nuclear power had brought a rod of ...”

“... the pit and gallery’ – not Milton or Poussin, but ‘the tragedy of Hamlet’ and ‘the Don Giovanni of Mozart’. His polemic concludes with an indignant glance at ‘authority standing drearily and persistently aloof from all popular sympathy’ – presumably a reference to Eastlake’s superior manner – when it purchases pictures ‘for the ...”