“... he perceived as a genuine talent.’ Curiously enough, Agate also ‘nurtured the talent’ of Harold Hobson, who was to be the powerful reviewer of the Sunday Times when Tynan was on the Observer. According to James Harding, Hobson unknowingly benefited from Agate’s personal problems. The proprietor of the Sunday Times had heard a story about Agate ...”

“... era, like Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake: the Last of the English of 1866 and Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold: Last of the Saxon Kings from 18 years before. King Alfred has a certain dim life in general awareness, but most educated people would be hard put to go past him, Harold and maybe Ethelred the Unready in a list of ...”

“... At first Dickens tried to deny that Harold Skimpole, the parasitical aesthete of Bleak House, had been based on his friend Leigh Hunt; but later he confessed, not a little proudly, that the character was ‘the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words . . . it is an absolute reproduction of a real man ...”

“... housing than others,’ she wrote, inelegantly but sincerely, in her autobiography. People who love her in spite of her stance on grammar schools rather than because of it, are in love with a particular vision of her, and not with her politics. So if her popularity wasn’t based on her political achievements or her ...”

“... formed Communist group march by, I saw in the middle of the marchers a barman whom I had grown to love for his winning smile and general meekness. His fist was raised; he was roaring out some radical slogan. He was not simply looking for better wages for barmen, but wanted, it seemed, something new for all mankind. Another night, as I wandered in the Plaza ...”

“... both with the typescripts from which the printer worked ... and with the published books’? Only love could have moved a mountain the size of Wolfe’s scribblings, we might conclude, were the resulting biography not so bereft of affectionate touches. Donald’s methods require that the facts be allowed to speak for themselves with the least possible ...”

“... the best; you need a network of alliances and debts. Politicians buy friends just as customers buy love from prostitutes. When out of office, Heseltine prefers to conduct his affairs from his place of business rather than the Commons. That’s a reasonable thing to do, but not for someone who is seeking votes there. In fact, there’s always been a suspicion ...”

“... uneasily between the back and the front half of the New Statesman. He was inclined to see (and love) his ‘negroes’ as sculptures, objets d’art, patterns of dance, to be described to British readers in an amoral aesthetic way: but there were spasms of humane indignation at the French mode of government and, as a concomitant, a growing respect for the ...”

“... he became more fascinated by the middle distance, by walls and trees and roads until, finally, his love affair with the landscape ended with him on his hands and knees looking ‘into the faces of small flowers’. It is appropriate that there are two faces on this book: on the inside of the dust jacket, a black and white image of Longley, everyone’s idea of ...”

“... our own, Shapiro quotes the sonneteer Giles Fletcher, who wrote in 1593 that ‘A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandry, and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none.’ ‘If Giles Fletcher could compose sonnets to “try” his “humour”,’ Shapiro says, ‘Shakespeare could have ...”

“... Cussin’ Triathlon, and all who for charity’s sake, or for emulation’s sake, or in the mere love of idiosyncrasy, have booked themselves a place in this most engrossing of trivial fond records. The Guinness Book sells by the million, which is not altogether surprising, for it has the form of a list, and lists, together with maps, are the stuff and ...”

“... across America, crowds gather to shout: ‘I bought your camera,’ I buy your eyeliner,’ ‘I love your hair,’ ‘You have the cutest smile,’ ‘I’m your Number One fan.’ He reserves his praise for Kenneth, who has gained immense fame and fortune doing women’s hair, yet, Aronson believes, has managed to remain ‘proportionate’, owning ‘the ...”

“... as applicable to the male sex are semantically neuter. Thus a charming poetic passage on parental love is sternly transferred from the masculine gender adopted by previous translators into a set of pronouns that modern English could not apply to a person. So, too, a law of King Aethelberht of Kent – the earliest extant piece of written English – is firmly ...”

“... century. These writers aren’t rejecting their ancestors; there’s no anxiety of influence, as Harold Bloom calls it, but a benignant sort of Oedipal relationship. If they’re among the best, though not the most representative, of current thriller writers, it’s partly for having something, if only a fantasy, to oppose to the generally dehumanising ...”

“... fallacy. For Lord Randolph, the long term did not exist: he would have agreed wholeheartedly with Harold Wilson’s dictum that a week in politics is a long time. His one serious purpose was to get to the top, and his method was to operate the political stock-exchange, buying and selling blocs of support and the policies that went with them. Speech by speech ...”