“... is that he’s a die-hard monarchist, as he reveals in his memoir, A Royal Duty (Michael Joseph, £17.99), a book at once agonisingly boring and shamefully fascinating. Much the most interesting bits are the insights into such things as what the Queen has (or used to have) for breakfast: ‘one slice of granary toast, a smear of butter and a ...”

“... spies, ‘between five and ten thousand’, if a report quoted in the novel is to be believed. George Blake, sentenced in 1961 to 42 years in prison for spying, makes a few brief appearances and plays an interesting part in the plot. Intelligence, we learn, is a matter of levels of clearance. One set of persons believes they are building a warehouse. Those ...”

“... The reviewer of fiction can pretty easily acquire enough second-hand information to enable him to imply easy familiarity with the oeuvre of a writer he has only infrequently encountered. There can even be a temptation to go a step further, by seeming to assume that this knowledge will be common to all cultivated people. In the case of Arno Schmidt I am tempted towards no such subterfuges, partly because my ignorance of the man and his work, prior to my reading of Evening Edged in Gold, was total, partly because I imagine numerous other potential British readers will be in a similar position ...”

“... for all practical purposes appointed by the United States. But none of this is going to happen. George W. Bush’s contempt for international rules and opinions has been particularly apparent in recent weeks. The announcement that the bidding on Iraqi reconstruction contracts would be limited to companies from countries that had contributed troops to the ...”

“... more serious than his father and when I stood on the edge of the kerb and shouted, “Wharro, George!” he didn’t look round. He didn’t know it was me’); the Muratti Cup (the annual football game against Jersey, like the Harvards against the Yales in Guys and Dolls), the one time Ebenezer leaves the island: ‘I wasn’t all that struck on ...”

“... Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill. The misery deepened fully in Kit – the account of his ...”

“... Young Turks to contest MacDonald, lurched into even deeper disgrace, while Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury were simply not memorable. Clement Attlee, the leader for twenty years and the man who led Labour to the new Jerusalem of 1945, was, in the event, the most serviceable hero, but he was never beatified, let alone canonised. Not only did he lack ...”

“... a tremendous blow-out, complete with wines and cigars, at the White Lion in Cerrigydrudion. But Michael Sampson, Anthony’s father, who had scattered the ashes nine times over the mountain, looks cold and ill at ease in the faded press photographs. And the Rai’s widow was not present. Soon afterwards an Aunt Mary, never met before, came to visit the ...”

“... a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are poets: but they are individual poets, not a school. They are not even two rival schools, though some of them have started fabricating a split, presumably in the hope of establishing that there ...”

“... European allies. He also defended it in the House of Commons, and the foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, even appeared on television to defend American actions. At a televised ‘teach in’ in Oxford in June 1965, Stewart argued that ‘the future relationship between North and South could, in time, be a matter for the genuine free decisions of the ...”

“... achievements may be to ensure the death of the ‘new world order’ famously heralded by George Bush after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, and to destroy an institution that has helped to prevent international wars for over half a century. In 1945, the United States and fifty other countries created an international organisation to ensure ‘that ...”

“... In a Foreword to this very substantial book Michael Ffinch says that G.K. Chesterton ‘was above all things a great champion of Liberty’. He goes on: ‘This being so, it has often come as a surprise that in religion Chesterton should have moved away from the Liberal Unitarianism of his childhood towards Catholicism ...”

“... as villains. The star of London Weekend Television’s new Once a thief? is 22-year-old Michael Baillie, who began his criminal career as a burglar at the age of eight, and served his first borstal sentence at the age of 15. According to the Sunday Times, he originally wanted to play football for Aston Villa, but now he’s thinking of taking acting ...”

“... with Haig and Robertson that the war could only be won on the Western Front and those, like Lloyd George and Churchill, who believed in ‘knocking away the props’ – but between those who believed in a traditional British strategy of minimal military and maximal economic contribution, of harbouring economic strength in support of Continental allies who ...”

“... were invited back merely to keep her company. Her biggest Hollywood affair post-Sinatra was with George C. Scott, the most ghastly of all her lovers. Gardner had no private life. Her failed marriage to Sinatra inspired In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, one of the great heartbreak records. Nelson Riddle said that Sinatra’s voice at this period was ...”