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“... shutters put up at the Colosseum’. If a rider’s scoreboard light is on at Signpost Corner, it means he’s only a mile short of the finish line. The expression is also used of someone nearing the end of their life. His subtitle is ‘Memoirs of the Movies, among other Matters’, which has a certain Old English alliterative charm. The memoirs of the ...”

“... encounter Medieval Latin poetry, if at all, only on record sleeves. For them Carmina Burana means the awful Orff. In his Preface Peter Godman speaks of his ‘solitary task’ writing a book on Carolingian poetry ‘in this damp island off the coast of Europe’; and the preponderance of German names in his notes and bibliography bears out the ...”

“... They worked for these things obliquely, discreetly and without any Leninist clarity about the means.’ Thatcher later came to see it as ‘treachery – with a smile on its face’. That is almost certainly not the way they saw it, though many of them felt profoundly guilty about what they were doing. It was, in their own minds, merely how the game ...”

“... think that they could get a good picture of my life from these pages; but it is not so.’ David Newsome, invited and challenged, has entered the labyrinth, drawing the rest of us with him into an implacable game initiated by the diarist. The mirrors and images multiply, with Newsome, the reviewer and the reader locked together in observation, and the ...”

“... half-crust. (‘That bread alone was worth the journey,’ they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.) Art has a morality of its own, and the aesthetics of cooking and eating aspire, in ‘foodism’, towards the heights of food-for-food’s sake. Therefore the Third World can go suck its fist.The ...”

“... playing at home breeds a sense of solidarity, or what used to be called team spirit, which means that players have more confidence in each other and work better as a unit. I’m not saying that’s definitely what happens. But Moskowitz and Wertheim haven’t proved that it doesn’t. The key figure that they don’t really discuss is the disparity ...”

“... form of wit which is less a statement about the world than an indirect expression of character by means of sheer nagging insistence – came naturally to Sturges. He sometimes caught himself at it. ‘Money? My God, I earned so much money, so much that it seemed unimportant to me and I came to pooh-pooh it … the last thing in the world one should ...”

“... Communist ‘front’ organisations; the darkened, lower face involved the use of very different means to achieve the same end without provoking nuclear war. One of these means was the employment of surrogate forces to support movements of so-called ‘national liberation’ without the direct involvement of the Red ...”

“... vantage-point, can decipher. But, says Kierkegaard, that leaves out of account precisely what it means to live in the world. It leaves out of account the choices men always have to make without any knowledge of ends, and it leaves out of account the directions not taken, relegating to darkness those who have made the wrong choices or the choices not condoned ...”

“... David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three lines and he claimed that it contained his memory of ‘a Sergeant with his pike going into an Ale House, and his Dog following ...”

“... the snakes all her life. And she knows enough to realise that Manhattan is no escape. For what she means by California is America as a whole, or the westward tendency, the restless, vague assertion that it is all going to turn out for the best. Instead of it being a suitable subject for autopsy. There have been arguments over the years about Didion: has she ...”

“... cult of the Bhagwan Rajneesh. Returning to New Jersey in orange garments after a summer in India, David announced that he wanted to change his title in the university catalogue from ‘professor’ to ‘swami’; teach ‘The Wisdom of the East’ instead of ‘Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner’; and replace the furniture in his office with a simple ...”

“... All in all, I get the feeling that TV overrates its audience’s blood-lust, or squirmlust. Take David Dimbleby’s grilling of Tony Blair on Panorama. Most of the interview was spent raking over Blair’s Old Labour past. At first this line seemed fair enough. Blair, after all, had on that very day been assuring his new City chums that almost nothing the ...”

“... Good Book says, come to us all. We all know that each of us will soon disappear from the Earth. David Raup’s book compounds our pessimism by pointing out that – if humans are anything like other animals – the fate awaiting our species as a whole is also an almost certain annihilation. Very few creatures persist for long in evolutionary time. There are ...”

“... and John Balliol, lord of Galloway. Both claims originated in the marriages of the daughters of David, earl of Huntingdon, the youngest grandson of David I of Scotland. Balliol had a claim by primogeniture, as the grandson of Earl David’s eldest daughter, Margaret. The strength of ...”