“... Observer on the Sunday. Just over a year ago a previous diary of mine had this to say about the young English player Paul Gascoigne, allegedly wayward but already deeply acceptable to the crowd: ‘Bobby Robson’s team had hardly left the field, after the recent defeat of Albania at Wembley, when he was disparaging the contribution of Paul Gascoigne, who ...”

“... herself, put a practical perspective on the matter when she revealed that she was well aware her young men did not find her particularly sexually desirable but hoped that she would help them in furthering their film careers.’ In other words, one woman’s ‘uncomplicated’ joy in going to bed with a handsome man is a toy boy’s cynical power ...”

“... uniformly laudatory. This was not easy in the face of critics as formidable as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Basil Liddell Hart, and by the beginning of World War Two the attempts to defend him were looking increasingly threadbare. The publication of Haig’s Diaries after the war (unkindly described by Lord Beaverbrook as committing suicide after ...”

“... the 51st Annual Conference of the Labour Party, held just up the coast at Morecambe in 1952. The young Jim Callaghan spoke twice on that occasion, first against the denationalisation of road haulage by Mr Churchill’s Cabinet and then in a sharp attack on the hypocrisy of the Bevanites, who had swept to victory in the previous day’s NEC elections. It was ...”

“... Amis-Barnes-Ishiguro as among the younger pillars of British fiction. She was two years too young to receive a full entry in Margaret Drabble’s 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, which featured only writers born before 1939. She wrote feelingly in 1984 about J.G. Ballard, who was, she rightly predicted, about to be turned by ...”

“... be: as fearlessly investigative as Harry Evans’s Sunday Times, as intellectually stimulating as David Astor’s Observer, as full of human interest as the Daily Telegraph. It wasn’t clear who would do the dirty work of actually getting the paper out, but surely it couldn’t fail. The Independent’s offices were, and are, in the City, and I was struck by ...”

“... to explain the crystal formation of ice. Walking the frozen wastes around her native Thule from a young age, Smilla has developed an uncanny sense of direction that enables her to find her way in the worst blizzard. This special gift is reinforced by an unusually comprehensive knowledge: a student of glacial morphology, she is equally versed in the Inuit ...”

“... were staggering downstairs and out to our front gate. Information passed up and down the street. A young woman had been mugged. She was unhurt, and being comforted. Audibly the police were on the way. Soon there was the sound of their boots as they raced from their squad-cars and vans. I had heard that sound last during the Springbok tour of New Zealand, when ...”

“... ancient ‘quantity theory of money’ which, two centuries after it was so elegantly spelt out by David Hume and a century after it was translated into snappy but empty symbols – MV = PT – by Irving Fisher, is still the basis of so much analysis of inflation. As Sir Ian says, ‘old doctrines never die: in economics, they never even fade away.’ He ...”

“... is that they contain two meanings. For instance, in Spring (1563), the head and shoulders of a young man is represented by many spring flowers. The particular meanings of man and flowers are not as meaningful as that there are two, instead of the usual one. Further, what is exciting is not the two meanings but the relationship between them, the gap and the ...”

“... one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and David Herold, still have their heads free: their expressions – private reckoning, a kind of baffled fear – are legible on their faces. A large man in a white coat and Panama hat is fussing round them, carrying with him the incongruous atmosphere of a summer ...”

“... when going in and out of the lab. The stepping-stone signified the independent spirit of the young scientists in the lab – they had all been to America – as well as their low regard for the virus as a health hazard. Bird flu killed only birds. Influenza’s secrets were falling fast to molecular biology. It was possible to explain why new strains ...”

“... certainly felt it necessary to keep on good terms with him. In the volumes under review the young John Constable makes several appearances. Farington gave him good advice about not taking a dead-end job as a drawing-master. Constable took this advice, but mercifully paid less attention when Farington suggested how he should develop as an artist: ‘I ...”

“... a gay LA eaterie, all waiters are dressed as cops and the maitre d’ as a police lieutenant. One young gay took the law enforcement fantasy to its natural conclusion and seduced a speed-cop into chasing him down the freeway. He refused to stop and the cop opened fire. When the wreckage was examined, it seemed the offender had come a moment before the bullet ...”

“... more time to accumulate form. The three men whom he followed – Kenneth Clarke, Kenneth Baker and David Waddington – together occupied the post for just a few months more than he has already served. Baker’s brief romp managed to produce two absurdities, the first comic in the form of the Dangerous Dogs Act, the second tragic, in the form of his refusal to ...”