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“... English-speakers to reassess Switzerland’s pioneer Reformer, but, nearly half a century on, Bruce Gordon still has every reason to try to get the news out beyond the manicured shores of Lake Zurich. Few are better placed to do so: Gordon is steeped in the Reformed Protestant tradition that owes its birth to ...”

“... Good Soldier Biggs ambles from a Brixton boyhood into petty thieving and friendship with big-timer Bruce Reynolds, who asks him to make one for the big job because he can produce a bent train-driver: ‘I knew before the meeting that there were qualms about my being included on the job, because I was such an unlucky thief; even ...”

“... of Old Mr Turveydrop. He was not alone in this, if you bear in mind the solo thespian flights of Bruce Chatwin. A woman in Italy with whom Chatwin used to stay remembers an afternoon when the maid came running downstairs, frightened half to death by the noises coming from Chatwin’s room. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said the experienced hostess. ‘...”

“... off to Longchamp for the weekend. A thief goes home to the wife in Up-minster. So why did Bruce Reynolds, a main player in this country’s robbery of the century, choose to call his book The Autobiography of a Thief ? It was, he says, a bit of homage to Jean Genet. The Thief’s Journal was being translated into English just as ...”

“... in World War Two would have given it its death-blow. Nothing of the sort happened. The late Gordon Childs, who had worked in propaganda in the USA, told me that as a morale-booster, when inspecting factories in the war, the Duke of Windsor was streets ahead of any British or American public figure. If he had made a go of his assignment to the ...”

“... an anecdote-cum-fable that Michael Caine, as the faithful servant Alfred, tells Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne. There was a bandit in Burma, apparently, who stole jewels at will from almost everyone and was never caught – because he didn’t want and didn’t keep the jewels, he just stole them because he could. Alfred understands, as Wayne doesn’t, even ...”

“... scholarly flotsam. It was a review of a book called Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance by Bruce Pattison: a learned, exact, even exacting, piece, full of abstruse detail, acknowledging the book’s achievement but, in the manner of young scholars everywhere, ticking it off for not drawing on the latest scholarship.Reflecting on this unexpected ...”

“... looked for a position of some kind but without success. A deal was struck with his elder brother, Gordon, a leading Anglican theologian and Dean of Winchester, who took possession of the title deeds of the farm and offered them a loan. But the condition was that Helen was to take over. Her husband was to follow her instructions, even obey her orders.She seems ...”

“... hubris: ‘The Greeks have a word for it,’ we were repeatedly told. Jock (now Lord) Bruce-Gardyne, former Economic Secretary to the Treasury, managed to combine at least two of these factors in an article in the Times, ‘Hounded out by Hypocrisy’, the day after Mr Parkinson’s resignation. ‘So that great British tradition, hypocrisy, has ...”

“... existed. This world was Q’s cave: a warm, amateurish, freshly-dug hideout in which, say, G.S. Gordon, when he succeeded Walter Raleigh as Merton Professor of English at Oxford, ‘was said to have got the job largely on the strength of his Lit Supp contributions’. In that first year of the TLS’s existence, The Wings of the Dove was reviewed by ...”

“... Nevertheless, some revisionist historians have recently shown that William Wallace and Robert Bruce, icons of Scotland’s War of Independence against England in the late 13th and early 14th century, became unionist heroes in 19th-century Scottish culture. Without Wallace and Bruce, so Victorian Scots argued, Scotland ...”

“... real: Lord Melchett (Morgan’s 19-year-old buddy), Lord Astor and his bride, Lord and Lady Duff Gordon, a Frick, a Vanderbilt, Mr and Mrs Straus who own Macy’s, and also Thomas Andrews, the architect of the Titanic, and Bruce Ismay, a White Star official. Real or fictional, they divide roughly into a group of young ...”

“... not have his brains swallowed up in chaff. For women this protection is impossible.’ Well, Lenny Bruce had as good a claim to the title of Jewish intellectual as many of those in these pages, and he phrased it just as tersely when he said that all men want wives who are perfect mothers, perfect secretaries, perfect cooks and top-dollar, tireless ...”

“... unexpected high point in terms of historical house-hunting was provided by the British Ambassador, Gordon Wetherell. A tall, genial man in his early fifties, he had already upstaged his Gallic counterpart by giving the first part of his speech at the Maison Rimbaud in fluent Amharic. On the morning of our return to Addis, I went off with him and his wife Rosie ...”

“... lost his Midas touch.’ In October 2004, he carried the first of a long series of eulogies to Gordon Brown, then ‘odds-on to be prime minister before the end of 2008’. ‘The Brown transition,’ Goodhart wrote, ‘could help to realise the centre-left’s dream of governing Britain for a generation.’ What had happened? Nothing had shaken ...”