“... political career. This has all the fascination of political biography for those of us who, in Michael Oakeshott’s feline phrase, ‘cannot live without the illusion of affairs’ – even if our experience must perforce be vicarious as well as illusory. No reader of such pages in the early months of 1986 will be surprised to find that unresolved ...”

“... anecdote of a trip that Hunt made to the Bank of England in his later years: Hunt’s publishers, Smith, Elder and Co., gave him a cheque for £100; he didn’t know what to do with it and did not understand ‘presenting it’ at a bank, so they cashed it for him and gave him bank-notes, which he put in an envelope. On reaching home he threw it on the table ...”

“... anthology The New Poetry, which promoted Hughes and Plath over the stodgy Movement), Edward Lucie-Smith and, terrifyingly, Michael Horovitz, the editor of ‘one of the decade’s genuinely polemical anthologies: Children of Albion (1969)’. Stevenson’s fondness for Prynne over Larkin is less offensive than his reasons ...”

“... of order accounts for (among other things) Evolution, the evolutionary biologist John Maynard-Smith sees him off with ‘I just find the whole enterprise contemptible.’ When you are told that in the rosy future that now beckons you may have all the information stored in your brain downloaded onto disk (with back-up copies to ensure immortality), you ...”

“... through. In one of my ration I found the baptism, on 14 December 1640, of Eaffry Johnson at St Michael’s in Harbledown, a village half a mile outside Canterbury towards which I sometimes feel the fates nudging me, since I had already visited it in the course of Michael Levey’s research for his biography of Walter ...”

“... with short useful bibliographies to take things farther. In Fifty European Novels Martin Seymour-Smith redeems himself for the awfulness of Novels and Novelists. He is a man of immense reading in several languages, and without aiming at critical profundity, a lively, vigorous and intelligent commentator on all that he has read. Fifty European Novels begins ...”

“... between Intelligence agencies looks real, and all the rest looks like fantasy. Like the young Michael Innes, Sarah Caudwell both respects and flouts the conventions of the detective story. Thus was Adonis murdered is a very modern novel using the archaic epistolary method of Clarissa: aptly enough, because it has as much to do with seduction as with ...”

“... and sees that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected Vietnamese ...”

“... many documents and interviewed dozens of helpful people, many of them now dead. But the assiduous Michael Shelden has found lots more paper, and interviewed not only the survivors on Crick’s list but others whom his predecessor did not come upon. His book is as long as Crick’s and inevitably repeats much that is in the earlier work, so it was all the more ...”

“... partly by government attention to the long-term resource situation. Gray stands with Hayek and Michael Polanyi in regarding the epistemic character of markets as their greatest virtue: markets can transmit through price signals a vast amount of local information about economic conditions and initiatives that simply cannot be made available for general use ...”

“... at others it was V. Nabokov, Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, Véra Nabokov and for special occasions, J.G. Smith. Those in the know addressed themselves to the complete set: ‘Dear V and V’. Véra’s individuality was most publicly evident in her Jewishness. Unlike her husband, she was a double exile: a refugee from the Bolsheviks and from Russian ...”

“... has brought more professional skill to the debasement of British public life than you,’ Michael Heseltine recently taunted Mandelson, who beamed back appreciatively. Indeed, so fixed has Mandelson become in the political imagination as Tony Blair’s Rasputin and High Priest of Spin that he is sometimes still dismissed as a bit of a cartoon ...”

“... from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a sly coyness that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided country, was a ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... were 17N’s principal targets, for supporting the Nato bombing of Serbia. Curiously enough, as Michael Llewellyn Smith, a former British ambassador, reports in Athens: A Cultural and Literary History, the young Blair, on a student holiday in 1974, had witnessed the triumphant return of the exiled Constantine Karamanlis ...”