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“... to be done to restore the rule of law as well as to meet the piteous plight of the peasants in the West of Ireland, but there was no need to say, as Balfour did, ‘I shall be as relentless as Cromwell in enforcing obedience to the law’ – a bit like George Bush describing the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. Balfour’s land reforms in Ireland lived on after ...”

“... is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson (Timothy West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish ...”

“... really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ McCarthyism had been launched in Wheeling, West Virginia only four years earlier, in the speech where the senator claimed to have the names of 205 Communists employed by the State Department. No one then could have predicted his hold would break so soon. Yet the time of the fear lasted longer than the ...”

“... Anthony Trollope once proposed to write ‘a history of English prose fiction’, but ‘broke down in the task, because I could not endure the labour in addition to the other labours of my life’ – for ‘it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels.’ Such a wholesale reading of fiction takes on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect ...”

“... stretched beneath a pallOf melancholy that would leaveSomething of its gloom behind ...Or Anthony Thwaite:Now what you feared so long has got you too.The blankness has descended where you lieDeep in that building you already knew ...Or Steve Ellis:Hull was the global meridianall poetry was measured from;and now you’re gone, a flat blank gapempty as ...”

“... the Bodleian on the north side, on the east the Codrington, part of Hawksmoor’s All Souls, and James Gibbs’s Camera in the middle. There is actually another more modest library, neo-Gothic in style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in 1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe ...”

“... his terms. One notes with despair the presence in Lloyd George’s camp of the News Chronicle’s James Horrabin and Hore-Belisha, the most prominent Jewish politician of his day. One notes, rather more suspiciously, that this initiative was timed to coincide exactly with Hess’s similar bid for a separate peace. A separate peace of any kind would have ...”

“... it in a movie? Almost all the big stars lived in choicer parts of the city, in Beverly Hills or West LA, the canyons or Pacific Palisades. But in the decade of his major work, starting in 1947, Ryan kept a certain distance from the rest. And he was unusual in other ways: during the McCarthy years, together with his wife, Jessica, he founded a progressive ...”

“... bars of which bring back memories of what I most disliked about those times. Now it is back in the West End, and its revival coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most ...”

“... invited to jump the editorial immigration queue. At six times fewer pages than the next entry (Anthony Thwaite), the answer may be that his is a tourist visa. As their titles suggest, geography is equally crucial to the trade war pitting Longman against Norton. Given the inevitable overlap between their contents, it may be all that allows some harried ...”

“... missionaries, political leaders (Eyre, Joseph Sturge, William Morgan and John Angell James); major cultural figures such as Anthony Trollope, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, all of whom took part in the public debate about the events in Jamaica; as well as officers, scribes, landowners, creolised ...”

“... artists (Bell, Cohen, Knight) or authors (Allingham, Blyton, Compton-Burnett, Sackville-West and Sitwell), topped off with occasional politicians (Astor, Bonham Carter and Lady Lloyd-George) and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English ...”

“... or ‘respectable’ in the manner of Nunn May’s Birmingham brass-founding origins, or of the West German Salomons and Eichengrüns who supported Hilde, child of a Jewish-Catholic marriage, on her way out of a deeply disturbed and dysfunctional family setting. Berti’s mother had been a reasonably successful Viennese actress until her marriage, his uncle ...”

“... Andy Warhol produced a silk-screened Nixon with skin as biliously green as the Wicked Witch of the West and, in a riotous series of drawings, Philip Guston transformed the president’s ski nose and heavy jowls into a glumly expressive set of male genitalia. Nixon’s personality was even richer. Gore Vidal parodied him in his 1960 play The Best Man ...”

“... of the social sciences have the confidence to invoke the ideals of Herbert Spencer and Henry James simultaneously. In his second volume, Runciman proceeds to his own substantive social theory. He remarks at the outset that he will here be concerned only with the explanatory segment of his overall prescriptions. But this involves no shrinkage of horizon ...”