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“... threatens to stifle for ever the essential life of the characters. Think, for instance, of Paul Morel, who is left at the end of Sons and Lovers totally bereft, but walking towards – well, what? Like Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl, like Aaron Sisson, Gilbert Noon has to get right out and become ‘unEnglished’, as Lawrence puts it. So he is ...”

“... levelled at him. He has ransacked the archives and interviewed over two hundred people in order to lay a ghost which has haunted him since his childhood. As a boy, he tells us, he grew up believing that the Second World War was ‘a just and moral crusade’ ending in a victory over tyranny. The British had fought in the expectation that ‘with victory would ...”

“... a definitive list of the pet names used by the family. Nancy was Koko at home, Pauline or Paul to her husband, Susan to her sister Jessica, who was also Susan to her in return. Jessica was always Decca, except when Susan. Deborah was usually Debo, though frequently also Nine (a reference to her supposed mental age) or Tiny Swine (rhyming ...”

“... CPA fostered.* When the auditors first commented on the CPA’s lack of accountability, its boss, Paul Bremer, bullishly replied that their report ‘does not meet the standards Americans have come to expect of the inspector general’. In his just published memoirs, Bremer dwells on infighting within George Bush’s cabinet and his claim that he tried and ...”

“... at distance about beauty’s throne. There worship and admire, and then they die, Daring no more lay hold of her than I. Reason to worth bears a submissive spirit, But fools can be familiar with merit. Who but that blund’ring blockhead Phaeton Could e’er have thought to drive about the sun? Just such another durst make love to you, Whom not ambition led ...”

“... clothes torn to tatters, which flapped about his white thighs. He put on some clothes of mine and lay panting and sighing after the luxurious enjoyment of so much exercise.’His openness wasn’t typical of the rest of his family either. Julian’s younger sister, Angelica, wrote bitterly in her memoir Deceived with Kindness about the way her mother’s ...”

“... there. But the illusion of democratisation nevertheless deserves special examination. Why did Paul Wolfowitz and a few others argue, with reported sincerity, that a democratic Iraq was vital to America’s national security interests? True, they did not anticipate the exorbitant costs of the war, in lives and money. But they did assert that Iraqi ...”

“... pregnancy she had a miscarriage which left her infertile. That misfortune, according to MacCabe, lay behind the ‘sorrow and death’ of the fallen-woman melodrama Vivre sa vie (1962). And the break-up of Godard and Karina’s stormy marriage found expression in the fugitive-couple melodrama of the intermittently musical and finally suicidal Pierrot le fou ...”

“... back through his pieces for the paper, and the reviews of his books, among them a glowing piece by Paul Foot in 1986, is to know that he isn’t easily pinned down. Yet if there were laws against inciting party political hatred, Johnson would have been fined and marginalised as a red-baiter on many occasions in many countries: he is a reliable, aggressive ...”

“... has started, which I’m always impressed by. In the unlikely event of my being asked to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph I’d have to decline, if only because I couldn’t walk the few steps backwards it requires. Not the least of the queen’s achievements is that she can still do this in her nineties.26 November. A new biography of Graham ...”

“... Kaminskys might have been among them, had it not been for the efforts of Adolfo’s older brother, Paul, who successfully petitioned the Argentine consul in Paris. In January 1944, they were released. ‘Why us, and why not them?’ Adolfo wondered. In Paris, he bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But ...”

“... The methods of the medieval masons were complicated and ‘would have been difficult to explain to lay people, even supposing that the masons had wanted to – which they didn’t’. New features could be introduced without any sense of anachronism, rather as a new picture may be hung in an old house. ‘Britain’ itself was still a semi-mythic ...”

“... not that many – and the high rate of acquittal, which in England, where evidence was weighed by lay juries, stood at around 75 per cent. There was no smooth narrative arc from credulity to disbelief, any more than there has been from faith to atheism.Though the Middle Ages were alive with heterodox and heretical opinions, religious strife was the product of ...”

“... seem, in such a sentence, already to hear the elegantly despairing voices of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Some of Barthes’s other generalities are rather glib too (‘a modern masterpiece is impossible,’ ‘order ... is always a murder in intention’), and his eager, stabs at historians’ history (‘Now the 1850s bring the concurrence of three new ...”

“... nobody had told royalty it was a divine creative spirit for three hundred years, and the whole lay-out of this ad-hoc theatre, with the Queen in a high glass cage before them, addressed personally, and any other audience only let creep in along the sides, made it the strangest performance they were ever going to take part in. The mad king of Bavaria could ...”