“... In 1951 he exchanged wedding vows with a man, Jess Collins, but while this gave him a stable home and a partner for life, it didn’t do much to slow his trysting. Duncan approved of any commotion that held him at its centre. A blether to his enemies, his friends saw him as a conversationalist in the Coleridgean mould: ‘a circling man/in a seizure of ...”

“... case. It appealed to Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s indispensable right hand: cardinal, archbishop, lord chancellor, Wolsey was a formidable broker of power. And it also bought the services of a clever (and therefore expensive) attorney. This was Thomas Cromwell, who in early 1519 went to Rome to make his client’s case at the pope’s court. He journeyed via ...”

“... might be nearer the mark.Meanwhile, Johnson shows a keen interest in shoring up his power at home. The Tory manifesto contained a commitment to repeal the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. The Act is said to be widely unpopular, and at the last election the Labour Party also promised to do away with it. But do we really want to go back to the old days of the ...”

“... on that side of the Atlantic, without ever managing to communicate his whereabouts to anyone at home. Peter Ackroyd’s Milton in America (1996) seems curiously, if perhaps unconsciously, parasitic on this earlier extravaganza. Milton, however, despite some fleeting fictional attention from Robert Graves, has never been able to vie with the Romantics in ...”

“... must have then felt like her oversize presence in literary life. From her late teens she made a home of the Mandrake Club and Caves de France in Soho; she argued at the soirées held by the literary journalist and Romanian émigré Miron Grindea. In every interview – there were several – she bemoaned the ‘dry’, ‘academic’ consciousness of her ...”

“... pumped out ‘detailed truth with believable lies’, and was intended (like the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw from the other side) to rot enemy morale. She was there for less than six months, but it sensitised her to the fine line between fiction, conspiracy and falsehood which she treads so expertly in many of her novels. Her allegory of Watergate set in a ...”

“... could be formed other than of particular folks. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs brings home the way in which tradition and the individual talent can converge in that astonishing thing, a well-nigh instant authentic tradition. ‘It is a reflection of the proverb’s vitality that new ones are continually being created’; on the other hand (a ...”

“... has ever made Who’s Who in Australia, though family legend has it that my great grandfather was Lord Mayor of Brisbane for a time in the 1880s ... I have to dress up my material: it is very ordinary stuff.’ This is modest and charming. It will also serve as an introduction to Peter Porter’s primary subject-matter. He is richly intrigued and preoccupied ...”

“... of Canada have an embossed red crown on his official stationery? When Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, George successfully dissuaded him from calling a ship HMS Pitt, because the name was ‘neither euphonious nor dignified’, and the men might invent ‘nicknames of illconditioned words rhyming with it’. And opulence and privilege only ...”

“... companion Ross from the party scene in Paris. Taking up an offer to visit them at their country home, Gault House, Carston soon contemplates a romantic fling with Scylla, only to be humiliated when she decides in favour of Picus, a friend and neighbour who until now has been living with his lover Clarence. Carston feels cruelly deceived, while ...”

“... sexual excitement of the relationship between Oliver Alden and his father’s ship captain, Lord Jim: a relationship which moves through the range of feeling from sexual captivation through the disappointments of an unacknowledged and unconsummated love affair to an ambivalent, sentimental friendship of the kind Santayana himself had with the second ...”

“... a series of digressions about every subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to mention Lord Balogh, the Balliol don Harold Wilson recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway ...”

“... routinely appeared in American business jokes of the period. Jews were meant to be at home in commerce; Eliot’s “Bleistein” is not.’ The image of Bleistein’s gold teeth in ‘Dirge’ picks up the fondness Jews were supposed to have for that commodity. Bleistein is a commercial failure, however, who lacks even a pauper’s grave – a ...”

“... reference to Palestine as ‘a land without people for people without a land’ – an echo of Lord Shaftesbury’s romantic formulation forty years before. Europe’s Jews, Hezl urged, should fill that providential void. To the surprise of the first Zionist emissaries, Palestine was already inhabited. Herzl’s attempt to solve what he and Europe’s ...”

“... rest of his life. The narrative of the walk concludes with the entry for 24 July 1841: Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary – her and her family are as nothing to me now though she herself was once the dearest of all – ‘and how can I forget Quotation marks opened but never closed. The forlorn plea is ambiguous, both question and ...”