“... how the system works. Some aspects of the streets around the Acropolis were reminiscent of home, of Hackney: our Olympic makeover. There were newly pedestrianised walkways, planted and primped, in place of the chaos of buses, honking taxis, competitive guides I remembered from holidays in the 1950s. Thickets of incontinent graffiti rivalled Hoxton and ...”

“... story another narrative may awaken and begin to stand up. And that will be the story you take home: the unending story of the story itself. You’d do well to snap your pencil and walk away at that point. Exhaustion can be a wise counsellor. But sometimes the second story not only stands up but takes to running: it comes after you, and even in your sleep ...”

“... do with Clough these difficulties are compounded by two calamitous fires. The first destroyed his home Plas Brondanw and all his records in the study/studio and attics there. The second, gutting the main hotel building at Portmeirion, destroyed an archive assembled over two years by Amabel and myself with a view to a memorial exhibition in 1981. Clough had ...”

“... whether his phone is being tapped. In 1980 he concludes (quite fairly) that the ‘club of ex-home secretaries’ is ‘one of the worst features of British public life’. On Any Questions (October 1979), he finds himself commenting on ‘sexual matters’ for the first time – ‘I defended homosexuals and prostitutes 100 per cent.’ He records on 29 ...”

“... him once a fortnight in term for an hour’s discussion on the problem I was dealing with – the home front in the Second World War. It was like being spirited away in a time-machine. To say that he brought the past to life would be true but quite inadequate. What he conveyed was the sense that the past was an unexplored country in which the traveller was ...”

“... West, while the domestic arm of the OGPU stamped out even the suggestion of support for Trotsky at home. Zionism – that is, Jews – became a major enemy in the latter years of Stalin’s reign, and a KGB purged of its Jewish members (the prohibition remains to this day) was sent out to detect ‘the Jew squatting beneath the lot’. It was a mission which ...”

“... reminiscences. Most of the previous biographers – Hilton Brown (1945), Sir Angus Wilson (1977), Lord Birkenhead (1978) – have accepted the Kiplings’ version as literally true. Certainly no one, not even Charles Carrington, who takes a less literal view in his official biography (1955), has ever seriously maintained that Kipling made it all up. Not until ...”

“... human’. Moscow was full of ‘thousands of well-stocked shops’, Robeson’s wife Essie wrote home in 1937, with ‘books everywhere, outrageously cheap ... ’ Robeson told Ben Davis Jr, the black American Communist, that he wished ‘the Negroes in Harlem and the South had such places to stay in’ as the Russian workers’ homes. The Soviet Government ...”

“... blood is poured by experienced hands which do not shake serving up to Messer Domeneddio god and lord  the recycled eternity of his butchered son,  this mouthful of himself alive and warm. This is homoousianus, this is the cup  to catch and keep him in, this is where he floats  in a red cloud of himself, this is morning sun blotting the columns, the ...”

“... queen whose companions and courtiers, including such carnival creations as the millionaire Lord Galen and the gypsy sibyl Sabine, are for the most part dedicated to maximising anarchy. The charmed circle or square of the ‘Avignon Quintet’ may be said to include all Durrell’s characters – those to whom he has given names. That is, the bond of ...”

“... with the Bonham-Carter family and his consequent assimilation into the ‘Liberal way of life’, Lord Longford’s to his membership of the Roman Catholic Church, Michael Stewart’s to the influence of the Foreign Office, the Foreign Office’s to ‘departmental empire-building’ and the Conservative Party’s to its ‘age-long desire’ to reimpose ...”

“... his transitory income in beer’. Since by their own account both can explain the first, for ‘a lord who did not make a good show of himself and his following risked oblivion, and oblivion would surely end in his estates being given to a more pressing claimant on the king’s good will,’ and since the hideously offensive characterisation of the second ...”

“... the original economic considerations which brought Britain to colonise Uganda in the 19th century. Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria’s Conservative Prime Minister, put it like this: Administration of the country is not the sole or the main object that should interest us. It is our business in all these new countries to make smooth the paths for British ...”

“... not when it’s carried back to the stories themselves. Bunter was never knowingly a mocker or a lord of misrule. He wasn’t at ‘the head’ of any clique – on the contrary, he epitomises the hanger-on. When Hughes mentions Bunter’s ‘magnificent frailty’ we may wonder how this attribute evolved out of such habits, peculiar to the Owl of ...”

“... their targets – for example, an opposition legislator’s generous acknowledgement that although Lord Lieutenant Townshend ‘bullied and blustered he was merry and loved his bottle’. The protagonists have by no means the monopoly of all the wit. Macaulay, since we have mentioned him, would have been glad to have anticipated Dr McDowell in such a line ...”