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“... in The Tiger and the Rose; but he is evidently not quite satisfied with them. Turn for a moment to John Masters’s strangely similar novel, Man of War. It is an apologia for another sort of fighting man, a professional soldier. The hero, Dusty Miller, squeezes his way into the British Army during World War One, aged only 16; when World War Two comes ...”

“... example of the ordinary soldier’s memoir and covers a lot of the ground already traversed by John Masters, Bernard Fergusson and Michael Calvert. Yet it is none the less welcome for that. Despite the profusion of fighting soldiers’ memoirs, from all fronts, the appalling severity of their ordeal is still not properly appreciated. This is one genre ...”

“... of Fiore. Neither judgment is even approximately true, but this search for singular sources and masters is so ingrained an intellectual habit, as an alternative to more general analysis, that we shall not soon see its end. Yet there is something to be learned from this continual production of past authorities and supposedly heterodox traditions, as an ...”

“... a connection between specialist and general knowledge of atoms, particles, forces and fields. Some masters of high science have become sceptical of any possibility of popularising their subject without making a mere caricature of what they know and love. But it is more in keeping with scholarly universalism to welcome every effort of this kind with positive ...”

“... in Australia’, Murray had acknowledged that all he claims for MacNamara can be claimed for John Clare in England at the same date. Of MacNamara’s ‘insouciant rhyming’, he says that it ‘can be seen as a proletarian version of Byron’s earlier manner, and it mimes the informality of a free settler’s hut rather than the fitted regularities of a ...”

“... The jacket informs us that Loon Lake is ‘a novel by E.L. Doctorow Author of RAGTIME’. Ragtime must have been a hard act to follow. In its day (1975), it was the most highly paid-for novel ever. Doctorow had well over two million dollars in subsidiary-rights advances and a whole generation of readers were introduced by it to the meaning of the word ‘hype ...”

“... the nothingness of Mercurial Lore Screaming, ‘One nature rejoices in another nature, One nature masters another nature.’ A certain man was burnt to death on Desolation Island By an unflickering, nonluminous, tongue of ...”

“... revolutionists with a schema. The pervasive influence of Country publicists like Thomas Gordon, John Trenchard, Bolingbroke and Benjamin Hoadly on colonial pamphleteers is now taken for granted. American historians have tested Bailyn’s thesis by extending and particularising it. This is what T.H. Breen has done in Tobacco Culture. The impact of Country ...”

“... life is both centrally important and irretrievably contentious. The personnel of the ‘Modern Masters’ series may simply map the credal disorder of our days, the fitful intellectual allegiances of a society of masterless persons. Past Masters, however, are, or at any rate ought to be, figures of historically proven ...”

“... the Mill. Rutherford had sat here on the wall and watched the atoms pursue their unbroken curve. John Maynard Keynes had looked into that clear declension and seen the economic consequences of the Versailles Treaty. Wittgenstein had seen the silence of what cannot be expressed, Alan Turing the soul of a machine. Apparently there was now some crippled young ...”

“... The first time Alexander Masters met Stuart Shorter, he was crouched in a doorway next to the discount picture-framing shop round the corner from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge: as it happens, the framing shop I used to work for as a sandwich boarder in my teens. Every Saturday the shop owner would hand me a board and a stack of leaflets and I’d hurry down to Christ’s Pieces, a public green in town which was also, I now know, Stuart’s home ...”

“... dark. They might be giants. They made me a fugitive. They made me a criminal. They only kill their masters. They shall have music. They were sisters. They still call me Bruce. They won’t believe me. They won’t forget. Alcove Is it possible that spring could be once more approaching? We forget each time what a mindless business it is, porous like ...”

“... and was met by a near unanimous lack of critical acclaim. The screenplay was based on a novel by John Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India before and during the Second World War. Masters’s family had had a relationship with India stretching back five generations; I have been told by elderly ...”

“... the Messenger, a title rich in ‘poor me’ implications; this one is called The Wages of Spin (John Murray, 261pp., £18.99, March, 0 7195 6481 6), the implication of which is that Sir Bernard wants to impose a buffer zone between himself and those who now do the bullshitting job he once did: they being headed, it seems, not for a knighthood but for the ...”

“... its members had played their part in meeting the not so subconscious desires of their political masters and dressing the intelligence up. So should John Scarlett, the head of the JIC, take the rap? Not according to Butler: ‘We realise that our conclusions may provoke calls for the current chairman of the JIC, Mr ...”