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“... Rebecca West died 17 years ago at 90, in a comfortable flat overlooking Hyde Park. She was a Dame Commander of the British Empire, to her amusement and gratification. Will she be remembered more as a character, thoroughly damely and commanding, or for her writings? Eleven novels, of no outstanding literary merit; nine other books on general subjects, of which the most admired (and especially relevant today) is Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, on Yugoslavia; a mass of articles on the public affairs of her time ...”

“... Howard told him sent Seabrook back to writers who are in the Oxford Companion, Waugh, Betjeman, Anthony Powell and Jocelyn Brooke. I’m not sure that any other critic is capable of enthusing, in one long breath, about Brooke and David Peace (author of a tersely written novel sequence from the era of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper). Nobody else would ...”

“... for the Liberals in 1904 he was obliged to find another parliamentary seat, in Manchester North West, which had a substantial Jewish electorate. In December 1905 Arthur Balfour resigned after his short, fraught spell as Tory prime minister, and the new Liberal government called an election which they would win by a landslide. Having already spoken against ...”

“... a Russian spy in MI5. Some say the spy was Sir Roger Hollis, the director. A man called Nigel West wrote a whole book saying the mole wasn’t Hollis: it was his deputy, Graham Mitchell (a former official of the Tory Party). Now we have another equally boring and unimpressive book by W.J. West, who says it was Hollis ...”

“... section of Fort Lee, New Jersey, then as now, was a sleepy, leafy enclave, overlooking the Upper West Side, a mile or so across the Hudson. My mother came out the front door of our house, walked up to me, knelt down, and said: ‘Augie, Gloriana’s daddy got very, very sick, and Gloriana and her mommy are going to have to go away for a while, so Gloriana ...”

“... class wholly generated from the loins of its founding father, King Abdul Aziz, better known in the West as Ibn Saud. Saudi Arabia was said in the Senate to be ‘scorning basic American interests’, which meant both human rights and Israel. Americans then and since have been obliged to explain that the weapons they were supplying to the Saudis would not work ...”

“... to with the Americans was that part of the settlements [i.e. the major settlement blocks on the West Bank] would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns … The significance [of the agreement with the US] is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the ...”

“... simple-minded or single-minded. Narrative can be capacious as well as directional. Burrow and Anthony Grafton are as capacious as can be. Their question is not so much ‘how did it come to this?’ – in Grafton’s case, to a more critical historicism in the 17th and 18th centuries; in Burrow’s, to professional history-writing in the 20th – as ...”

“... to creep into Houses, and lead captive silly Women’. It’s significant, in the history of East-West relations, that Shaftesbury could only understand the alien bogeys in terms of beliefs rather closer to home than Baghdad or Cairo.Another reason the work wasn’t taken seriously was that it eluded concepts of authorship: the stories were anonymous and ...”

“... and ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, the two stories that most audiences, in the ‘West’ and ‘East’ alike, would today think of as embodying the essential characteristics of The Arabian Nights. It would be easy and conventional to deprecate this as exoticising invention, but the ravelled history of these tales, early and late, discourages ...”

“... was killed by a second heart attack. He was 44. His body was taken to a cheap mortuary on West Washington Boulevard. ‘There lay American genius [and] not a soul was in the room,’ the journalist Frank Scully wrote in his book Rogues’ Gallery: Profiles of My Eminent Contemporaries. ‘Except for one bouquet of flowers and a few empty chairs, there ...”

“... of the occupation of the British Isles: ‘Aurelian Moors’ were stationed at Aballava at the west end of Hadrian’s Wall, near the Solway Firth. In the fourth century a number of people with North African ancestry seem to have lived in York, including a woman now known as Ivory Bangle Lady, who was buried in a sarcophagus together with bangles made of ...”

“... disasters, ended up as a bit-part in a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae at the Parthian Court (Anthony Everitt sanitises this event when he refers to Crassus’ ‘skull’). Some Romans drew an uncomfortable connection between the characteristic head-and-shoulders style of portrait bust that decorated their ancestral mansions and the eventual fate of so ...”

“... in Oxford and London. He wasn’t unaware that prejudice against immigrants existed. But the West Midlands was the first place, he remembered in 1998, where ‘I personally encountered people who said, “We don’t take any blacks here.”’ ‘People shouted at us in the street when we were going round trying to find places,’ he went on, ‘myself ...”

“... as well as one by Rodin and one by Epstein, in the wild landscape of the estate he owned in south-west Scotland. The setting is commemorated by John Haddington’s fine photographs, and the initiative richly documented by John McEwen (Keswick’s nephew), in Glenkiln. The sculpture by Moore which is most eloquent in this context is the bronze seated King and ...”