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“... more studied kind, has now returned to our food culture with the index ciborum prohibitorum which Victor Gordon prints in his ‘unashamedly racist’ English Cookbook. Chillies, ginger and sardines figure on the list if consumed fresh, cod if eaten salted; apricots are ‘borderline’. The French gentry have many faults, but at least they do not employ ...”

“... a set of memoirs in burlesque form? The glamorous world is conjured up in tottering hyperbole (‘Victor’s bed was like a raised tennis court covered in velvet the colour of a Raphael pope’s cassock. The whole Borgia family could have climbed into it and still left room for a last-minute reconciliation with the Orsini’) and pitted against various ...”

“... Gordon Burn’s work takes place at a point where fact and fiction, public events and private lives, fame and death all meet. He began his career as a proponent of the non-fiction novel pioneered by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer; his first book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper ...”

“... these two books have in common, so my comments will be seriatim. The earliest of the essays in the Gordon collection, which is by Gernet, who died in 1962 at the age of 80, first appeared as long ago as 1948; the remainder at various dates since 1968. Of the latter, three are by Vernant, five by Vidal-Naquet, three by Detienne. The fact that the Gernet item ...”

“... Minister. But that was only the start of such dalliance. The Express proprietor at the time was Victor Matthews, a builder and property-developer. Matthews was apparently desperate for an honour, and not best pleased when Junor got one first. But he didn’t have to wait too long. For the editor went selflessly to work among his cronies. The Prime ...”

“... around. And while Rupert’s still around (and Sir James, and Robert, and Tiny – and maybe even Victor: ‘I have the papers in which to give my views, but I think the House of Lords will be better’), reports of the ‘death of the press barons’ are somewhat exaggerated. The British certainly like to give the impression that the breed is still with ...”

“... is kind on this morning, and Maureen’s children have begun to pick up African manners: ‘Victor is seen to clap his hands, sticky with mealie-pap, softly, gravely together and bob obeisance, receiving the gift with cupped palms.’ Only, this has all been arranged ironically: its purpose is to set the scene for Maureen’s abdication and flight to ...”

“... and colleagues seem to have treated him as a guru, compelled by his ‘holiness’. Yet Lyndall Gordon suggests that later in life, visited by moods in which evil seemed everywhere, T.S. Eliot sometimes suspected the man he too had once thought holy was in fact diabolic. Reading Williams, you can sometimes see what Eliot meant. Williams seems to believe in ...”

“... new, and in a sense it replicates the treatment Eliot accorded to a book published in 1936 by Victor Gollancz called The Yellow Spot: the outlawing of half a million human beings. The title-page reads:                        a collection    of facts and documents relating to three       years’ persecution of German ...”

“... he is of ‘lesser worth’. The same kinds of thing, Weber suggests, happen after a war: The victor will of course assert, with ignoble self-righteousness: ‘I won because I was in the right’ . . . When the horrors of war cause a man to suffer a psychological breakdown, instead of simply saying, ‘It was all just too much for me,’ he now feels the ...”

“... such statistics all too vivid. Eight months after D Day, one company of the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders had just three men left out of the 115 who had landed in Normandy. But desertion and ‘combat exhaustion’ were rare as British troops in this sector moved through the Reichswald on Germany’s border with Holland. This was perhaps because ...”

“... units of accountancy constituting the present. All the successors, the amiable if cack-handed Victor Matthews, his feverish mayor of the palace, Jocelyn Stevens, and subsequent persons deepening the descent, still aspired to Beaverbrook’s peremptory ways, his habit of punting enthusiasms and nominating heroes. All that was missing was the flair. One ...”

“... Red Sea. Surviving only in copies, the text has been held genuine by a Semitic philologist (Cyrus Gordon). Superior literacy has rendered North America more prolific in pre-Columbian testimonies. About ninety years ago, a runic inscription was dislodged from the roots of a tree in rural Minnesota: a party of Norsemen (both male and female) had got that far in ...”

“... novelist. As judicious (though not hopelessly balanced) accounts, the new biographies by Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor confirm what the law of averages might have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable and the rest of it false. (Scott Lucas, by contrast, thinks almost all of it true.) Orwell was indeed ...”

“... working in Washington’s fields upsetting. Lost in the debate was the fact that the artist, Victor Arnautoff, a communist, had used the murals to challenge the prevailing narrative of Washington’s life and, indeed, American history more broadly. His murals were intended to show that the country’s economic growth and territorial expansion ...”