“... adequate to the task. Certainly, the recent appointment of Alastair Campbell’s ‘mate’ John Scarlett as head of MI6, following his loyal performance during the Hutton Inquiry, doesn’t look like the most shining example of New Labour preserving the ‘merit’ in ‘meritocracy’.* The prime minister sternly reminded the press that Scarlett was ...”

“... peglegs: all press-ganged upstream with Adam Dalgleish’s impersonator, Roy Marsden, for the Long John Silver show at the Mermaid. James is left with a heritage trail of selective quotations, a London Dungeon of waxwork crimes exhibited in authentic locations. This is an empty set, a set defined by its architecture (where even Mandy the Temp, in her ...”

“... These seem to be symptoms of reviewer’s terror, a well-known complaint like athlete’s foot, which hamstrings the reviewer’s normal responses through the fear that he must have missed some quite obvious point all his colleagues will have picked up. It must be said that Wodehouse’s books might be much more interesting if there were things ...”

“... nuke and a missile, load up on fuel and a nuke, fly out and up eight clicks, drop the nuke at the foot of the mountains, power-dive back down to base, load the shielding, fuel to the max with just one missile aboard (meanwhile the nuke explodes, shaking the ground; you don’t want to be fuelling at this point), then you climb like fuck, get to ceiling, and ...”

“... A few months before his early death from tuberculosis, John Keats scribbled these lines in his papers: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d – see, here it is I hold it towards you ...”

“... is a company called Keyboard Motorcycle Shipping That, not so long ago, only Transported nine-foot concert grand pianos And racing motorcycles, That was their only cargo, Music flowering into power. Nash is what Used to be called in the movies The strong silent type, A kind, courteous, muscle-bound gentleman with brains, Very smart, very honest, Very ...”

“... honour. Three of the contributors do, however, engage Kermode’s thought in a fairly serious way: John Stokes, George Hunter and Patrick Parrinder. Two ways of doing so were possible. Either Kermode’s general view of the critic’s task or his ideas concerning specific texts or groups of texts could have been the focus of attention. Stokes and Hunter choose ...”

“... These limitations become more apparent when Hitchens writes about the Left. He tears into Michael Foot for his ‘treacly exaggerations’, his awful sentimentality, his Beaverbrook-worship and his ‘glutinous style’. Fine. But the fact that his general angle of attack on Foot is from the left, and his judgment that ...”

“... Hall dictated more than a million words, he tells us, as source material for future historians. To John Goodwin, his trusty press officer, he has allotted the task of anthologising some quarter-million of those words. Goodwin has been his word processor. This book is an example of information technology. The dictator was surprised (he tells us in his ...”

“... of imperial oppression, the icy giant of the North. ‘Naturally I despise my country from head to foot,’ wrote Pushkin, ‘but I am not going to let a foreigner get away with sharing that feeling.’ Here is how a Russian writes a poem about his own tyranny, he seems to say. ‘It was the best of times; it was the worst of times’: Pushkin’s poem ...”

“... who is a working peer. The only leading official to whom the Prime Minister talks regularly is John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, who shares something of his political approach and whom he usually sees discreetly, rather than for talks heralded by the TUC. Union leaders have had, perforce, to get used to a vastly diminished status – though none of ...”

“... breed,’ says one leading terrorist (half-way through his latest novel) to another. ‘Just set foot on the soil of Ireland and you’ll be crucified to it forever,’ thinks another Power character, an honourable English colonel (retired), recalling the words of a high-up republican, or – it may be – an RUC inspector. Ireland – or, to be ...”

“... 69-year-old author, walking book in hand, Godwin got down from his chaise and accompanied him on foot to his house, which he noted to be ‘like that of a common farmer in every respect’. Almost thirty years his junior, Godwin found Bage to be a man who had ‘thought much’ yet remained ‘uncommonly cheerful and placid, simple in his manners, and ...”

“... In 1845 Captain Sir John Franklin led 128 men in search of the final stretch of the Northwest Passage. When they failed to return from their expedition, a number of relief parties were sent out to find them. Over the next decade, naval commanders, traders and amateur sleuths collected objects and relics from the area: signs of what may have become of the lost men ...”

“... the very notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the ...”