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“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... in Bromley. Similarly, Kureishi’s next novel The Black Album was named after a bootleg LP by Prince to whom the main character, Shahid, is devoted. Prince plunders freely from various musical genres, from rock or disco or funk or rap. To popular amusement he is forever adopting new personae: a satyr, an androgyne, a ...”

“... own account, Irina was born a nonconformist – even sympathising with the Russian equivalent of Peter Rabbit. As soon as she was old enough to count the change, she went out with the other children to stand in the bread queues. At school they had sums to work out, showing how much the State spent on each of them: why was the State so stingy? It was a ...”

“... Julius II from Heaven in the Julius Exclusus, which shows us Julius locked out of Heaven by St Peter in person, who refuses to acknowledge such a coarse bully as his successor. The books are worth buying for Dr Michael Heath’s edited translation of this work alone. I suppose Erasmus did write it, though he never acknowledged its paternity. The hardest ...”

“... in ‘want of well pronouncing shibboleth’. Rochester, perhaps, would have agreed with Lord Peter Wimsey (another post-war figure) that ‘a principle has no claim to be called a principle until it’s killed someone.’ In the end, Rochester may have become a prisoner of his own disbeliefs. Much of what he wrote may appear to have no discernible ...”

“... Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and Peter Temple-Morris deliver themselves of staggeringly banal pronouncements. In spite of some of them going on ‘fact-finding’ missions to the Middle East, they are as ill-informed and full of poor advice on their return as they were before. Even worse, when ...”

“... have been known for years and have been drawn on by biographers and critics like Morton Cohen and Peter Berresford Ellis. Here the Haggard collector and enthusiast D.S. Higgins has selected about one-fortieth of the text and presented it in an edition which deserves to be called amateur. He has not indicated omissions by ellipses, the annotation is ...”

“... world of homosexual felicity, a literary world of gentle other-persuasion, whose emergent prince was Truman Capote. In Style, Style, Style, beside a drawing of a portly lady in a yellow dress and a pink umbrella and a green fan, it says: ‘Fashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going.’ And this was the first ...”

“... that the text disappeared beneath the interpretation.’By contrast, the great merit of Peter McPhee’s new synthesis is the weight it gives to the earthy, even mundane, aspects of revolutionary experience. It examines 1789 from the peripheries, rather than Paris, as seen through the eyes of the menu peuple, rather than from the heights of the ...”

“... Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by taking on the second most powerful man in the ...”

“... study; why it wasn’t in the recent RA exhibition is hard to understand. 17 January. The Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker-Bowles come to The Lady in the Van. Normally royalty is guaranteed to put a frost on an audience but their presence peps things up and it’s a very good house. This is because, unlike most royal persons, the ...”

“... has strange results. It is at least not obvious that the proposition ‘If Queen Victoria thought Prince Albert handsome, King George V collected postage stamps’ expresses a causal truth entirely on its own. I have to say that I disagree with Honderich not only on this point but over almost every opinion that I have so far attributed to him. To begin ...”

“... freedom from convention. He farmed, traded with the Masai and became a white hunter, taking the Prince of Wales out twice on safari. Karen Blixen writes to her mother that ‘he has a magical effect on me; never have I ever known such a feeling of happiness as I have in his company, it is as if I get light and air after having been confined in a room.’ He ...”

“... Polish rebel exiled in Paris, one of Custine’s many Polish friends: Chopin and the exiled leader Prince Czartoryski were others. Gurowski ran up considerable debts, and much to Custine’s amusement, eloped with the Spanish Infanta. Custine’s Polish connections may have played a large part in his decision to travel to Russia, but the journey was at least ...”

“... Bryant, in 1987, though other problems intervened and the volume is only now brought to harbour by Peter Marshall, the pre-eminent authority on the late 18th-century British Empire, who took on the task in 2011. The lengthy wait allows Marshall to pay sad tribute to the general editor of the series, Paul Langford, who died in 2015. Independently, Langford’s ...”