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“... of all. To understand the absurdity of sending Wood to run the Philippines in 1921, imagine George V dispatching Kitchener (had he survived the war) to govern Ireland. Circumstances had changed, radically and irreversibly. Nationalism was in the ascendant. The imperial twilight had begun, and the time had come to bow out gracefully – the posture that ...”

“... has seemed distasteful, a relic of a less enlightened era of international relations. America, George W. Bush insisted during the 2000 election campaign, had ‘never been an empire’ and had no intention of becoming one. Politicians still shy away from the term. But since the attacks of 11 September 2001, the term ‘empire’ has been used without ...”

“... art being Guy Liddell. The development of this intelligence community is the theme of Christopher Andrew’s book, which contains the first reliable narrative history of the secret services from Victorian days to the present. Needless to say, he has received no encouragement from Whitehall, and former members of MI5 have been warned not to talk to him. As he ...”

“... Last year a group of American climbers on Everest discovered the body of George Mallory, the British mountaineer who died on the mountain in 1924, close to the summit, which he and his companion, Andrew Irvine, may or may not have reached. Since then there has been an unseemly rush to cash in on the discovery with at least six books, a poor film made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the globe ...”

“... of 9/11, implying that it had shown great leadership in finding what happened that day very bad. George W. Bush has boiled doublethink down to a sticky residue: ‘you’re either for us or you’re for the terrorists’ is its central flavour. But choosing New York for the convention was overweening even by Republican standards: like Woody Allen, only less ...”

“... stodgy. And after some backing and filling, he more or less owns up to having been ravished by George Melly at school and to have been both ravisher and ravishee until his early days in uniform. The remainder of the narrative of this period is punctuated by things like beagling with Father Gilbey or passing weekends in great houses with private Tridentine ...”

“... Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill ...”

“... and said had just been born (Prince Octavius had died five years earlier at the age of four). When George realised what day it was and that he had been kept in his straitjacket and not allowed to go to church, he suddenly went under the sofa, saying that he would converse with his saviour there, and that no one was to interrupt them. He also claimed that he ...”

“... fairly boring way: no man older than 21 wants to be told they’re a failure unless they live like George Best. And that’s Loaded’s central anxiety: it exhibits a very British smallness of style in its understanding of male recklessness, and its world of Saturday nights is really a lament for passions spent or never experienced. So why are men’s ...”

“... is a great spirit of survival. His best novel, A Single Man, concerns a cultured Englishman, George, an academic at San Tomas State College in California. George’s lover has died and he is reaching for his next move. He must make a life out of believing life is not over, which is hard if you’re feeling lost. The ...”

“... volume of their Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker point out that the nine-year run of the Dial alone amounts to ‘around 10,500 pages of text and 1200 pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to read … about equivalent to reading 21 books ...”

“... I recognised this reverse asylum-seeker, at once, as the performance artist and memory-cannibal Andrew Kötting. Umlaut rising above the lunar o of his surname like a pair of ice-blue staring eyes, too mad to blink. There are only four Köttings to be found, so he tells me, in the United Kingdom phonebooks. If anyone is looking. This stretch of the South ...”

“... of the exercise was to empower the commander-in-chief to wage his global war on terror. Yet with George W. Bush a president in the mould of William McKinley or Warren Harding – an affable man of modest talent whose rise in national politics could be attributed primarily to his perceived electability – Cheney and his collaborators were engaged in an ...”

“... First, sort out your Scotts. George Gilbert Scott (1811-78), hereafter Sir Gilbert, designed the Albert Memorial, the Foreign Office and the tumultuous cliff of a hotel that shields St Pancras Station. A spiteful ditty, summing up the Victorian business of church restoration, also accounted him first among ‘the earnest band that spoiled half the churches in the land ...”

“... everything, and everything was glorious. Warhol became a virtual-reality show starring himself: Andrew Warhola playing ‘Andy’ better than Norma Jean Baker ever played ‘Marilyn’. In 1968, while Soviet tanks prepared to roll into the Czechoslovakia of Andy’s origins, Warhol was writhing in agony on the floor of his New York studio, shot by Valerie ...”