“... 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 ...”

“... many of the other characters, including Sinclair himself in a memorable walk-on (‘a flannelled Lord Longford: on sulphate’), are drawn, kicking and screaming, one assumes, from real life. Some of them I recognise. One or two of them I know. That is Sinclair’s autobiographical bit. Think of Downriver as if Alice had wept a river of tears, rather than a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they freed voters from ‘all sense of shame or responsibility’. ‘Everything secret,’ Lord Acton said, ‘degenerates.’ Public opinion had sanctioned the foundation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 on the understanding that its officers would be uniformed and employed in preventing crime, not in detecting criminals. Detectives, the Times ...”

“... plot to befuddle the minds and enslave the bodies of the Chinese. As for the British back home, they never approved of it. The fact that it was called an ‘opium war’ almost from the beginning saw to that. There were attempts to soften the drug’s image – upper-class aesthetes in England had, after all, been experimenting with it for years, and ...”

“... don’t concern literal ghosts. ‘It is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact,’ Marlow says in Lord Jim, a little before Stephen Dedalus starts his discussion in a Dublin library – only four years before, if we think of the 1904 setting of Ulysses rather than the time of the writing of the remark. I’m pretty sure Marlow is right about facts, but do ...”

“... loyalty to him and his family: warriors like William Hastings, who went from mere gentleman to lord in a matter of months, and the Welshman Sir William Herbert, who became earl of Pembroke; and administrators like Thomas Montgomery, the medical doctor William Hatteclyffe and Thomas Vaughan, who oversaw Edward’s system of chamber finance, which gave the ...”

“... Walpole to take up sculpture for therapeutic purposes after the suicide of her dissolute husband, Lord Milton. Her special forte (apart from cross-dressing) was dog sculpture, and Walpole regarded her work as equal to Bernini’s; she also presented busts of Charles James Fox and Nelson to Napoleon – Fox, because of her connection with the Whig opposition ...”

“... then at least well thought of by physical scientists and of use to their researches. Impressed by Lord Rayleigh’s country-house laboratory at Terling Place in Essex, Loomis established a superbly equipped laboratory in an annexe to his house in Tuxedo Park, and there began to entertain a succession of eminent, often émigré, often Jewish scientists whose ...”

“... ruled by a proconsul, Hubert Murray (brother of the classicist Gilbert). In the opinion of Lord Hailey, Murray’s system amounted ‘to no more than a well-regulated and benevolent type of police rule’. Murray himself spoke of ‘administration by bluff’, and insisted on the importance of keeping up appearances. ‘Discarding one’s socks leads ...”