University Of Cambridge Alumni

"In the fog of war Mr. Horne manages to show exactly what was happening, without ever going beyond the evidence. The book combines good history and good reading."

"Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that "liberated them from all restraints" and allowed them to experience every impulse as a "divine command". What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they "conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities". Podhoretz added, "It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life". Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an "expanded consciousness", the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery."

"They make excellent life-partners. No doubt some old bigots will claim that marriage is a uniquely human institution, but it won't take long to find enlightened vicars who believe that human and canine dignity is in a very real sense enhanced by recognising inter-species unions."

"How much survives of the other peacetime prime ministers since the war? What were John Major and Harold Wilson and Anthony Eden for? Won't Tony Blair's manic grin end up as ruined as Ozymandias's "wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command"? Among the great might-have-been-prime ministers, most fall into one of two traps. On the one hand are the too greedily ambitious, the Denis Healeys who don't stand up to the enemy at the moment they should, and the Michael Heseltines, who are too impatient of the system that they seek to dominate. On the other are the prophets – the Bevans, Benns and Powells – who may be more original than their more conventional rivals, but cannot be called successful."

"Mr Charles Moore announced he will be stepping down in April after six years as editor [of The Spectator], during which time the magazine's circulation doubled to 37,000 and advertising revenue increased tenfold."

"It is not in South-east Asia, the Middle East or Africa that the ideological battle of the seventies seems likely to be waged, but in South America. Here, one feels, may well be the battleground where the orthodoxy of Soviet communism will triumph definitively over Maoism, or vice versa."

"[[Allen Ginsberg|[Allen] Ginsberg]] turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, "We'll get you through your children!" For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true."

"I was in Chile shortly after Allende came to power, and predicted the economic ruin to which his regime reduced the country. That, coupled with the recent escalation in the arming of extreme left-wing para-military groups, seemed to make at least a temporary military take-over inevitable sooner or later, if all-out civil war was to be averted. The activities of Señor Corvalán's Communist Party, sub rosa, indeed bore a large responsibility for the chaos and generation of hatreds which led to the present intervention by the military. Equally...Chile is now in a "kind of civil war", and therefore draconian measures (of brief duration, one hopes) by the new regime have to be expected."

"Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves."

"But what really matters is...the question: "How many divisions does the Pope have?" In Chile it has been the concentrated fire power of the "divisions" of militant trade unionists that has enabled Allende to carry through his revolutionary programme (thereby, incidentally, bringing the economy to ruin and the country to the verge of civil war). And, in the British context of, say, 1980, on whose side could one count the comparable trade union "divisions"? With the "Lib-Labs" or the "Soc-Labs"?"

"Unlikely to be challenged as the definitive account of one of the most efficient and astonishing campaigns of all time."

"The only ego I've got is when I'm performing."

"My abiding memory ... is my mother’s reaction. [...] She and my father attended a big first night at the Vic, with all the glitterati there — Judy Garland and goodness knows who else. My poor parents were gobsmacked. Anyway, Sir Laurence comes up at the reception and asks my mother if she has seen the Othello film yet. "Oh yes, we thought it was very good, Sir Laurence," she replies, "but that was a bugger of a wig you made Derek wear." She was quite right. It was a bugger of a wig — but I just wanted the ground to swallow us up."

"One afternoon, Mrs Gandhi had some free time and decided to go for a drive, along with me. A few miles outside Kabul she saw a dilapidated building surrounded by a few trees, and asked the Afghan security officer what it was. Bagh-e-Babur, he told us, and Mrs Gandhi decided to drive up to it. The protocol department went into a tizzy as no security arrangements had been made. Regardless, we headed towards Babur’s grave. She stood at the grave with her head slightly lowered and I behind her. She said to me, ‘I have had my brush with history.’ I told her I had had two. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. I said that paying homage to Babur in the company of the Empress of India was a great honour."

"But until we Europeans wean ourselves off America, not just militarily or economically but psychologically, we really cannot function without it and will always surrender. It has dominated us for a long time."

"The Labour revolution knows no limits. Give it five years and this farm we were standing in could be collectivised, populated by strapping Soviet boys looking doe-eyed at tractors."

"Thank you, Matthew Parris! Since Esther Rantzen bravely went public with her stage four cancer, I've been invited onto several shows to put the case against assisted suicide – and, frankly, I've failed. The argument for relief from pain is so strong. The current proposal – that two doctors sign off a self-administered poison – is so limited that it seems hard to object. But then Matthew endorses assisted dying with such enthusiasm, eloquence and boundless insanity that one's doubts are confirmed. Yes, he wrote in a weekend essay, this will be the thin end of the wedge – but good!"

"Europe's hypocrisy is matched only by its impotence, and if Britain had any sense it would accept the Pax Trumpus and politely ask to join it."

"Do I feel responsibility as someone who made the case publicly for Brexit? Well, I'm a Catholic, so I always feel guilty. The older I get the more guilt I feel: I actually apologised to someone who trod on my foot the other day. Do I feel humiliation as a Briton? Never, never, never. I don't confuse my government with my country, and my country muddles on, as it always does, with a sublime indifference to what the rest of the world thinks. We don’t panic."

"The West feels lost. Brexit, Trump, the coronavirus: we hurtle from one crisis to another, lacking definition, terrified that our best days are behind us. The central argument of this book is that we can only face the future with hope if we have a proper sense of tradition – political, social and religious. We ignore our past at our peril. The problem, I argue, is that the Western tradition is anti-tradition, that we have a habit of discarding old ways and old knowledge, leaving us uncertain how to act or, even, of who we really are."

"Once upon a time, the key unit in society was the family. Today it is the individual. The only principle we can agree matters is choice, though with the death of religion and philosophy, the range of choices that we can imagine has narrowed drastically, as culture and faith have been replaced by holiday photos and video games."

"The authorities had gone on to inculcate their own classless ideals into students whose presence at the University was in itself a measure of their determination to climb the social ladder by the only means made available in the Welfare State."

"There's nothing worse than an introspective drunk."

"Certainty was essential to him and the written word had a certainty about it that everything else in life lacked."

"Fifty miles away, Lord Lynchknowle’s dinner had been interrupted by the arrival of a police car and the news of his daughter’s death. The fact that it had come between the mackerel pâté and the game pie, and on the wine side, an excellent Montrachet and a Château Lafite 1962, several bottles of which he’d opened to impress the Home Secretary and two old friends from the Foreign Office, particularly annoyed him. Not that he intended to let the news spoil his meal by announcing it before he’d finished, but he could foresee an ugly episode with his wife afterwards for no better reason than that he had come back to the table with the rather unfortunate remark that it was nothing important. Of course, he could always excuse himself on the grounds that hospitality came first, and old Freddie was the Home Secretary after all, and he wasn’t going to let that Lafite ’62 go to waste, but somehow he knew Hilary was going to kick up the devil of a fuss about it afterwards."

"The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading "" to Motor Mechanics."

"While he lived a violent life in his imagination, Eva, lacking any imagination at all, lived violently in fact."

"The number of choirboys indecently assaulted annually by vicars and churchwardens may lead you to suppose that England is a deeply religious country."

"President Bush doesn’t need toilet paper. He has Blair"

"All is fair in love, war and tax evasion."

""Liberal studies means..." said Mrs Chatterway, who prided herself on being an advocate of progressive education, in which role she had made a substantial contribution to the illiteracy rate in several previously good primary schools."

"By shooting your cook you were refusing him permission to enter your house."

"'Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.'"

"Sharpe is one of England's funniest writers. He's in the tradition of the 19th-century satirist Thomas Love Peacock, who wrote novels of ideas laced with physical, slapstick farce."

"If a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal."

"Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue and Vintage Stuff are books that hark back to a golden age of academic dottiness, of the kind that has all but disappeared since the 1940s when Sharpe himself was a student."

"When I was a fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye – such as my very first Governing Body meeting, when, sombrely robed, the fellows debated, hotly and with manifest ill will, whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based."

"I have yet to meet a liberal who can withstand the attrition of prolonged discussion of the inessentials. ... There are more ways of killing a cat than stuffing it with cream."

"They have more luck than bulls"

"I am in favour of foxhunting because foxes kill chickens"

"Even half an hour after reading Tom Sharpe's 14th novel, it's difficult to remember what happened in it. ... Wilt is a victim of our times, and Sharpe doesn't seem to like them much. ... Sharpe might be happier in another age – the 18th century, perhaps – but even then he'd find plenty to rail against. It's tempting to see him as a contemporary Smollett: his plots are guided by whatever vices he feels like including, or whatever images are in his head."

"Eva Wilt got to her feet and stood with the rain running down her face and as she stood there the illusions that had sustained her through the week disappeared. She saw herself as a fat, silly woman who had left her husband in pursuit of a glamour that was false and shoddy and founded on brittle talk and money."

"[P]opulists offering easy answers hate nothing more than the long, boring, mercilessly exposing business of trying to put them into practice. If the biggest risk to Reform is being shut out of power, then the second biggest might be winning it."

"I grew up a somewhere. Now I am an anywhere. Sometimes that disconnect gives me a rootless feeling: an odd vertigo I can't quite nail down. There is, of course, another phrase for it: liberal metropolitan elite. Nobody who has heard the vicious punishments an Ivers government would hand out to people who drive motorbikes without silencers would describe me as liberal. And I suspect actual elites have functioning kettles."

"It is hard to be a conspiracy theorist as a political journalist. Spend enough time staring into the heart of the institutions that run this country, and talking to the people who run those institutions, and the idea that any of them would be capable of pulling off an elaborate masterplan of the type espoused by the crankier parts of the internet becomes laughable."

"It's not that we're necessarily desperate to get into your club. It's more that we learned the hard way to be suspicious of men who want to keep us out."

"But the reason I'm not naming Sex Kitten Man either is that making this about any one particular idiot risks letting all the other idiots off the hook. For the point is it could have been any idiot."

"[A]ll the wrong people are in the spotlight. We have spent too long demanding that famous faces justify what they earn, rather than asking their anonymous managers to justify what they pay. It's not enough for salaries to be transparent if the assumptions underpinning them are shrouded in mystery. For if nobody will tell you the rules of the game, then it's impossible to know if somebody somewhere is cheating."

"The opening scene of Breathtaking, in which fictional consultant Abbey Henderson discovers that a mask meant to protect her from a deadly virus doesn’t fit because it was shaped for male jaws, meanwhile almost uncannily echoes the evidence given by senior civil servant Helen MacNamara to the Covid inquiry last year about how hard it was to get the problems women were experiencing with PPE taken seriously in Whitehall."

"In them hath He set a tabernacle for the sun, which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course."