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“... dubious morality. Building on the classic image of Walsingham as spymaster established by James Anthony Froude’s History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-70), his early 20th-century biographers, Sidney Lee and Conyers Read, presented him as an astute and distinguished patriot who laid the foundations for the ...”

“... seminars managed, ungently, by great professors, who greeted solecisms and foolish remarks with a blunt ‘Tace.’ A career as a classicist entailed writing prefaces to critical editions, reports on technical discoveries and certain sorts of formal address in Latin. Still, most scholars considered classical Latin an inferior language, in beauty, depth and ...”

“... and globules of pure fact rise to the surface, the dishomogeneity annoys. Some reviewers of Anthony Burgess’s new novel say it has curdled: ‘so let’s say he does know all Walton’s percussion parts by heart, and has the Hebrew or the Russian word for almost anything, is he able to use them to tell a better story?’ I think he is. In Any Old Iron ...”

“... to be thrown to the ground in the most straightforward manner by the poet-Lothario Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, her cousin twenty years her senior, who was leading Mary and her children on an expedition into the desert. As Irish secretary, Balfour had had Blunt jailed for nationalist agitation. Knowing of A.J.B.’s tendresse for ...”

“... the only other lengthy attempt by an English novelist to handle part of World War Two as a theme. (Anthony Powell’s three relevant volumes in The Music of Time are too closely woven into the rest of the series to be considered.) The characteristic English novel of the past half-century has been marked, not only by realism rather than fantasy, but also by the ...”

“... is in the thick of it. John Melville is nearly (but not quite) as self-effacing a narrator as Anthony Powell’s Nick Jenkins, and Colin Elphinstone keeps reappearing in his narrative in accordance with a pattern not unlike the advance-and-retreat movements of A Dance to the Music of Time. Cairo, Brussels, Hamburg, Berlin, the BBC: we find him in all ...”

“... to ‘base and vile’ things. ‘When plain declarations will not enlighten people … and blunt arguments will not penetrate,’ he argued, ‘then doth reason freely resign its place to wit, allowing it to undertake its work of instruction and reproof.’ But how to amuse without giving offence? ‘There are two kinds of joke,’ Giovanni della ...”

“... Just west​ of Alice Springs is a turn-off marked ‘Flynn’s Grave’. It leads to a blunt stone plinth with a round boulder on top and a plaque commemorating John Flynn (1880-1951), a Presbyterian minister who was sent by his church to the Northern Territory in 1912 to investigate conditions in the bush. His report was grim, describing poor communications and scant healthcare ...”

“... Service exempted itself from positive vetting, relying instead on a system of personal references. Anthony Blunt, having been refused entrance to the wartime Intelligence Corps after MI5 found traces of his previous communist associations, managed to talk his way into MI5 with the support of influential contacts. He went on to pass a good deal of ...”

“... for the Arnots were blighted when ITV decided, despite Saudi diplomatic representations, to screen Anthony Thomas’s Death of a Princess – a fictionalised documentary, shot in Egypt, about the execution for adultery of Princess Mishail, granddaughter of Prince Muhammad bin Abdul Aziz. The film, with its gruesome reconstruction of the Princess’s ...”

“... But this is a delusion that would bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Anthony Cordesman, one of the most reliable military analysts of the Middle East, and a friend of Israel, argued in a 9 January report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the tactical advantages of continuing the operation in Gaza were ...”

“... to know this), scouring Eton with a literary purpose in mind, came face to face with a boy called Anthony Eden and put him down on paper as Harry Wharton. (In fact, this isn’t too wide of the mark. Charles Hamilton has left a record of how he went about the business of assembling his characters, picking up a podgy frame here, a pair of loud trousers ...”

“... in the past as those files of the Spectator where he found the famous pieces by J.D. Scott and Anthony Hartley, or the scripts of John Wain’s Third Programme magazine First Reading, or copies of the Reading limited editions of Wain and Amis. Mr Morrison claims to have eschewed gossip and attended instead to such questions as: ‘Did the writers know each ...”

“... mean that we should be no less careful in weighing the matter of betrayal in Auden’s case than Anthony Blunt’s defenders ask us to be in the case of Blunt. The feeling for political justice expressed by the English Auden has to be related to the at first hidden and eventually uncloseted commitment to homosexual ...”

“... a West London estate agent. His best friends are Tony, Nodge and Colin. Diamond Tony – formally, Anthony Diamonte – is a flash Italian hairdresser: handsome, charming, apparently successful, he has a flair for cruelty. Nodge – or Noj, Jon backwards – is an overweight cab driver with intellectual pretensions. Colin – just Colin – is a computer nerd ...”