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“... the biggest prig of all. When trying to adapt socialism to the affluent society of the late 1950s, Anthony Crosland had little time for this puritanical earnestness: ‘Total abstinence,’ he observed, ‘and a good filing system are not now the right signposts to the socialist Utopia.’ In at least two ways, however, Crosland’s put-down of the Webbs ...”

“... butler, an imposing Wodehousian figure, became an attraction in his own right, while at West Wycombe the châtelaine Helen Dashwood, known, not especially affectionately, as ‘hell-bags’, made her disdain for hoi polloi plain as she shooed them from room to room. Throughout these years, Lees-Milne remained ambivalent about everything in his life ...”

“... just about possible.Ashton went back to Egypt at the request of the US to help signal that the West stood united in favour of the military takeover. She was one of only a tiny number of people to visit Morsi while he was detained in a secret prison on Abu Qir naval base. Her account of the meeting is stunning. Having been flown by military helicopter, at ...”

“... the behaviour and aspirations that Lüthy had deemed irrational. One could then go back to the West, and see many similarities before the arrival of Machiavelli, the first Western political philosopher to exclude anything ‘divine’ or ‘magical’ from his thinking. The irony was that Bloom and Moertono, on the same campus at the same time, were ...”

“... is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson (Timothy West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish ...”

“... of guts in Alien. Seriousness is not an index of greatness, however: Watteau is greater than West, and the power of Bacon’s images is not diminished by these comparisons. From his answers to questions about his way of working, a model can be constructed of a process of controlled spontaneity, of marks made with unpremeditated directness and urgency to ...”

“... radical idea of abolishing public schools. It is possible to explain the absence throughout the West of any militantly radical newspaper of national importance by the relatively small number of people who believe in such ideas: it is much harder to account for the fact that there is no paper in Britain which supports the Labour Party in the way that the ...”

“... artists or canonical masterpieces’. There can be no room in such a project for artists such as Anthony Devis, adjudged by Waterhouse to be ‘an altogether minor person’; or those whom it is ‘sufficient to mention’ but unnecessary to discuss; or the numerous and nameless ‘journeymen hacks’ who ‘cannot find a place in a general history of ...”

“... come what may, he would help him. If so, then there is also a strong suspicion that Blair, like Anthony Eden in late 1956, misled Parliament and the public over the nature of the undertaking on which he was engaged. Eden insisted that he had had no direct foreknowledge of Israeli intentions; he was able to respond decisively, he said, only because he had ...”

“... than as a discourse in its own right; it is touched on substantively only once, in a neat chapter (Anthony Vidler) on Chateaubriand and the ‘Gothic Revival’, or that medievalising frame of mind which was to be a precondition of French Romanticism. The New History incorporates also the kinds of writing that have long fed off and into ...”

“... suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS. Thus Anthony Powell brilliantly evokes the dynamic personal impact of General Sir Alan Brooke in his novel The Military Philosophers. Brooke held positions of critical responsibility and as CIGS was titular head of the Army for the greater part of the Second World ...”

“... like that. A later reference is not quite so emphatically positivistic: To cheer ourselves [in West Africa] we used to hunt cockroaches by the light of electric torches, marking in pencil on the walls one point for a certain death, half a point it the roach had been washed down the lavatory bowl. I described this pursuit later in The Heart of ...”

“... to be at least partly fictional (A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story by ‘Anthony Godby Johnson’, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things by ‘J.T. LeRoy’, Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne), people felt aggrieved. They didn’t want imagined misery: no matter the quality of the imagination, they wanted experienced misery as ...”

“... Emily Leider, who has already distinguished herself by writing the definitive book on Mae West, had a ‘slightly cauliflowered’ left ear. Most photographs hide this ear, as did his protective cinematographers, so I must struggle to imagine it. If I were to write a brief memoir about my relation to Valentino or to his legacy, I might entitle it ...”

“... a half billion people on the earth … sixty million of them right here in California’. The US West Coast has been afflicted with a vicious Mucosa plague – a malady reminiscent of the encephalitis which has sent insecticide helicopters whirring above New York for the last two summers. Air-conditioning, the American addiction to perfect frigidity, has ...”