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“... Nunc dimittis, and indeed there is little sign as yet of this pugnacious historian departing in peace. Nevertheless, Return to Essentials is an occasion for a kind of obituary, however premature, an encomium of a great scholar whose industry and productivity continue to shame younger colleagues and whose notoriously conservative opinions on the nature of ...”

“... charges. If at any previous point one had suggested that Slovo would cheerfully make his peace with casino-capitalism, the response would have been unprintable and, indeed, it is now out of order even to remember such things. Yet Slovo achieved something that most of us can only marvel at: for many blacks he was living proof that there were good ...”

“... now meant enjoying a practised familiarity with expensive rare books and manuscripts. Despite David Garrick’s bequest of his impressive collection of Renaissance playbooks to the new British Museum in 1779, this effectively meant that to be a legitimate Shakespearean critic now required the independent means to own a substantial private library – such ...”

“... catching some distant magazines and one near tile. This casual domestic image has an extraordinary peace and strength, in large part summoned by its structural authority. In 1946 Cartier-Bresson photographed a black cat in the arms of a diabolically smiling Stravinsky, and a tabby startled by the regard of a reclining Saul Steinberg. Other props are more ...”

“... himself ‘entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the service of Queen and country, was one of his favourite books. When Kennedy was about to run for the Senate, according to ...”

“... rooms and days we wandered through Shrink in my mind to one – there you Lie quite absorbed by peace – the calm Which life could not provide is balm In death. Unseen by me, you look Past bed and stairs and half-read book Eternally upon your home, The end of pain, the left alone. I have no friend, or intercessor, No psychopomp or true confessor But only ...”

“... who were always on the look-out for customers. In reality, war isn’t much foggier than peace, sometimes less so. Serious developments are difficult to hide because thousands are affected by them – soldiers, guerrillas and civilians – and once the fighting has started the authorities become less and less able to check on and impede an ...”

“... wedding and the end of his student days), he has plans for a kind of Japanese-Australian War and Peace that will take ‘a decade to prepare before I even begin to write’. If he succeeds, it will be ‘the book into which I finally disappear, having overcome an inordinate need for attention the only way I could, by reducing it to absurdity’: The year ...”

“... hardly see the sky. The cafés have charming names that ‘read like a Levantine requiem’, as David Holden wrote of old Alexandrian phonebooks. From the terrace of the fish restaurant where I had lunch, I watched children playing on the beach; a few women were in bikinis, a rare sight in a city where more and more women wear full niqabs, including black ...”

“... masterpiece Waverley, a novel without which not only The Thirty-Nine Steps but also War and Peace could never have been written. It is interesting, though, that a critic so alive to Scott’s exquisite irony and good humour should lack a comparable lightness of touch. The only jokes in Kerrigan’s book are made at the expense of the ...”

“... with his hawkish American anaesthetist, whose rants about Iraq tend to drive Perowne into the peace camp. But he observes with mild disapproval the levity of the marchers gathering outside: ‘If they think – and they could be right – that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an ...”

“... her ‘vanity, which is ridiculous; exert your absurd caprices upon others; and leave me in peace.’ On her return from Ireland, Caroline put on a charade near Brocket. Villagers danced round a fire, on which Byron was being burned in effigy, throwing his letters and gifts to her into the flames. But the burnt offerings were only copies. Even then ...”

“... Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in Constance Garnett’s much ...”

“... this would be an attack on one of its means of livelihood and would be construed as a threat to peace; the Arab scheme, they claimed, denied Israel’s right to exist. At the Alexandria Summit in September 1964, by which time Israel had already begun test pumpings on the first stage of the National Water Carrier, the Arab states decided to go ahead with the ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”