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“... Although Carpenter skilfully weaves the friends – Connolly, Betjeman, Anthony Powell, Brian Howard, Robert Byron – into a completed composition, the others serve chiefly to start a scene or two and swell the progress of Waugh himself. Of course this gives a misleading picture of period and individuals, but that is in a sense the object of the ...”

“... even now by memories from school. Till I read N.A.M. Rodger’s book I could not have placed Richard Grenville and the Revenge within twenty years, nor had any idea what he was doing ‘at Flores in the Azores’; nor do I know even yet (for Rodger is certainly not going to mention it) who wrote the poem about him, but I can remember whole stanzas of ...”

“... painters, Velázquez was the only one who, to be fully appreciated, had to be seen in Spain. Richard Ford, in his Handbook for Travellers in Spain, had made the same point two years earlier. He conceded that Murillo was more successful ‘in delineations of female beauty, the ideal, and holy subjects’, but Velázquez’s ‘representation of ...”

“... with them.Everett was born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina. He studied with the logician Howard Pospesel at the University of Miami, where he read Frege, Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, but abandoned postgraduate study after deciding that fiction offered a more fruitful way of thinking about how ‘meaning gets constructed’. ‘I start with something ...”

“... a British colony such as Singapore need a British consul? What we know for certain is that Jeffrey Howard Archer was born on 15 April 1940, at 102 City Road, London, then the City of London Maternity Hospital. His birth certificate, which Mantle hasn’t bothered to examine, shows that his father, William Robert Archer, lived at 48 Highbury Grove, then a North ...”

“... such it can be called, was to impersonate the captain of a destroyer in In Which We Serve, leaving Richard Attenborough to play the reluctant rating. It is staggering to find Coward dissolving in tears because, despite Mountbatten’s efforts on his behalf, he did not receive a knighthood in the 1943 Honours List. Any such award would have caused nationwide ...”

“... myself seriously as a student. In fact, it seemed to make it somewhat easier for me to write.’ Richard Klein, now the celebrated author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, was one of the guys. Approached by Duke for a quote, he wrote: ‘For decades I have felt guilt and shame for having performed toward her in a way that was unprofessional, exploitative, and lousy ...”

“... There is also one Michael Agnolo from Caravaggio who is doing marvellous things in Rome ... He thinks little of the works of other masters ... All works of art he believes to be ‘Bagatelli’, child’s play, whoever by, and whatever of, unless they are made from life, and that there is no better course than to follow Nature. And so he will not make a single brushstroke without taking it straight from life ...”

“... several short stories, and a number of children’s books published under her maiden name, Jean Howard – is a woman half of whose life was spoilt by mental illness. ‘My Golders Green, where I lived till I was twelve,’ she writes, ‘was all green dusted with buttercup yellow, a little furred at the edges, contrasted with dark, jungly Weybridge, where ...”

“... a phrase, a little high culture, but it has eerie undertones if you think about it. The soon-to-be Richard III had a very particular discontent in mind, and he had extreme solutions for it. Right at the end of the movie, a group of children in a classroom rise in turn, each saying, ‘I am Malcolm X,’ and of course this is attractive in terms of the fairy ...”

“... every high-profile prosecution launched since 11 September 2001, from John Walker Lindh and Richard Reid to Zacharias Moussaoui and José Padilla. This is particularly mystifying given Ferguson’s pronouncements elsewhere. He asserts in his introduction that ‘we learn from the past in order to guard us from ourselves,’ and his case studies ...”

“... a lengthy visual and aural collage, a sort of television series trying to forget about television. Richard Brody describes the result as ‘a kind of working through on screen of the network of associations that formed in Godard’s movie-colonised unconscious’. The key idea here, which appears again and again in French thinking about cinema, is ...”

“... the US as a sinister maritime republic with an all-powerful navy (Ahab is a fighting Quaker like Richard Nixon), Marvell hints at what the future may hold for a Commonwealth that has no institutional continuity. The theme of wounded male narcissism – the mower on a hot day mown, self-injured – may be one way of giving imaginative shape to what it feels ...”

“... cocksure, dreamy and irritating to any sensible woman ... Today I am no longer slim.’ Of Leslie Howard, one of the few colleagues he is negative about: ‘We were both quick, febrile, impatient and rude.’ The self-awareness is engagingly accurate, and his generosity to collaborators heart-warming. In this respect his gusto knows no bounds, especially in ...”

“... marry my Lady Garrard’s daughter’ – ‘I saw her and no more.’ At 18, he was offered Kate Howard, but ‘being half afraid of the greatness of her spirit I did not’. At 19, ‘I was wished unto a fine gentlewoman’ – ‘upon further acquaintance I disliked, and did not proceed.’ Finally, in 1613, when he was 22, he took the step (it hardly ...”