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“... of his country or to identify him with the so-called third man if indeed there was one,’ Harold Macmillan, then foreign secretary, said at the close. The next day Philby called a press conference, at which he acknowledged knowing Burgess but said he had no idea that he was a communist. ‘The last time I spoke to a communist, knowing that he was a ...”

“... the reasons for peace. When Robert Duvall as Kilgore makes his great speech about napalm (‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’), he concludes by saying the smell is ‘like . . . victory’. But he hesitates before he says the last word, and nods with tight satisfaction when he has, as if he had found a term that wasn’t obvious, and that ...”

“... Shattuck . . . with their romps up and down the glooming critical slopes of the Blooms, Allan and Harold’ – this is a fair sample, unfortunately, of his idea of lively prose. He accepts that post-structuralism, new historicism, queer studies and all the other movements he bundles together as Theory have done some good. They have made us more aware of the ...”

“... hare chases apart from Rain, Steam and Speed. In one of them, a hare runs over the spot where Harold was felled at the Battle of Hastings. In Apollo and Daphne (c.1837), Daphne prevents Apollo from helping a dog pursue a hare, foreshadowing the god’s doomed pursuit of the nymph herself, who chose to be turned into a tree rather than be caught. In a ...”

“... full of embarrassing resolutions about future conduct and exhortations to myself to do better. Love is treated very obliquely, passing fancies thought of as echoes of some Grand Passion.My first inclination is to put it in the bin, though I probably won’t. I can see why writers do, though, fearful that these commonplace beginnings might infect what comes ...”

“... word ‘problem’. Perhaps the best single introduction to Hamlet is the long essay that prefaces Harold Jenkins’s Arden edition. Jenkins opens his critical discussion with a sub-section entitled ‘Problems’, which begins: ‘Few, I imagine, would challenge the assertion that’ – here he quotes from Harry Levin – ‘“Hamlet is the most problematic ...”

“... for long periods’. This experience, he thought, ‘made him’. His father, he said, ‘didn’t love me and I didn’t love him either … It was very ambiguous though, because I was sexually attracted to him.’ Bacon ‘sometimes suggested he was raped, as if the grooms had stood him up against the coarse barn ...”

“... in knowing that, at last, we shall be united again, forever and for all eternity, in the love that God has given us to cherish and to increase so that we know, even now, that it is the greatest and most precious of all things in life and afterwards. If it’s a long time before we meet again, we both shall find patience and comfort in that – you ...”

“... of her stepfather, her biological father having died when she was five). ‘To write, I must love my name,’ Sontag declared, and hers snapped into place like a double-barrelled shotgun; it made for a potent byline even when she was an unknown. She also looked famous before she became famous, another sign of a protostar. Early on, she emanated a campus ...”

“... was very young, our mother asked her whom she loved best, Mummy or Daddy. My sister did in fact love Mummy best but, being of an angelic disposition, lied diplomatically: ‘I love you both the same.’ Mummy didn’t speak to her for days.Not speaking to people for days was a habit of hers. But it wasn’t always ...”

“... What the animal yearned after, when he gazed forlornly out of his cage, was the freedom to make love to Edwina of his own choice … to break into that domain which, in fact, he could not break out of.’ His speculations slip from human to operatic:Was [Percy] already in the flare-lit, grotto-ornamented, statue-sprinkled garden of Count ...”

“... added, it would be sparkling, unassailable ... It betrayed (betraying means breaking the laws of love). It engaged in pillage. And lastly, it banned itself from the world by homosexuality. It thus established itself as an indestructible solitude. Later, Genet adds: ‘Betrayal, theft and homosexuality are the basic subjects of this book.’ So be it. But ...”

“... was no point, however humble, on which [the Persians] would not consult their English friends.’ (Harold Nicolson was then Counsellor at the British Legation.) ‘They would arrive with little patterns of brocade and velvet; they would ask us to come down and approve the colour of the Throne Room ... They must have red cloth for the palace servants like the ...”

“... wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points ...”

“... scientist who felt that he had never been properly appreciated either in academia – blaming Harold Laski for stopping him getting influential jobs – or in the Labour Party, and for this he felt his wife’s extreme beliefs were partly responsible. When they married, Catlin was teaching at Cornell; hating life as a faculty wife and having found no ...”