“... literate (Tomalin quotes a halting letter) ended his life corresponding with Edmund Gosse and Edward Elgar, and lived long enough to scent posterity’s massive approval of his work. The boy whose mother in 1833 had watched from the roadside the passage of Princess Victoria hosted the Prince of Wales at his own house in 1923: Tomalin includes the famous ...”

“... Queers’ assembling after dusk (they sound like a band from a couple of decades later). Hampstead Heath gets a few mentions, with police agents provocateurs getting up to ludicrous antics, as does the Coleherne in Earls Court, later London’s most famous leather bar, where in 1964 Keith Vaughan finds the pianist playing early Beethoven sonatas and ...”

“... given great prominence in Inglis’s text. They are printed, apparently, verbatim (though Stephen Heath, Lisa Jardine and others have protested they are garbled), and are treated as though they were primary sources. Yet the quotations are oddly at variance with the interpretation they are supposed to support, and seem often to serve as tokens of authenticity ...”

“... for comfort: from the first swivel to the Cambridge spies, to the last swell of satisfaction that Heath and Heseltine should have adorned Marxism Today – the unspoken addressee is as if an established order to which an accounting of the self is due in exchange. This appears to be the logic of that absence of close political discussion, or any real ...”

“... to become a barrister but spent most of his time with literary friends, including the critic Edward Dowden and the poet John Todhunter. John and Susan named their first child William Butler Yeats. Soon afterwards they had a daughter, Lily. As a law student, John Butler Yeats had begun drawing – and his talent at it, as well as the influence of his ...”

“... the first Penguin paperbacks, to give the paper an elegant redesign, and McLean commissioned Edward Bawden to draw a new version of the royal coat of arms that sat with the masthead on the front page. (That later owners and editors junked these designs was, for anyone who cared about such things, an aesthetic crime.) The new look displayed the work of a ...”

“... birth. I can remember almost nothing of the house we’d lived in previously, which was at 39 King Edward’s Road, Hackney. I know from a photograph that it was a large, dark, Victorian house, but when I went to take a look at it around 1950 I discovered that it had been destroyed in the Blitz. The other thing I know about it from photographs is that it had a ...”

“... to know that this was just a phase that most prime ministers went through (the exceptions being Mr Heath and Mrs Thatcher) and that as the novelty of their weekly interviews diminished so, too, did the flirting. It was another aspect of the myth of the Queen and her prime minister, the decline of the prime minister’s attention to her personal appearance ...”