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“... currency we’ve got, then what is? ‘Unconscious motivation,’ Lear wrote in his previous book, Love and Its Place in Nature, can be thought of as striving to be understood. Of course, in the most basic sense, unconscious wishes are striving to get themselves satisfied. But the fact that love is a basic force in the ...”

“... to the febrile frailty of the friendships. A typical progress is to begin by delighting in, say, Harold Nicolson for not being an owl (‘Sexually, I represent a buffer state,’ said the old buffer-bugger), and to end with dark mutterings: ‘Most unpleasant memory of last six months was drink with Nicolson in Café Royal. He must have been trying to ...”

“... Handsome Lady’ the widowed Caroline tells the unhappily married John that ‘if there is love between you there is faithfulness, if there is no love there is no fidelity,’ but he’s too slow to take the hint or too worried there would be gossip, and by the time his wife dies the widow is already dead. And in ...”

“... biography. John Gore chronicled the inner man, his tastes, hobbies and friendships; and Harold Nicolson described his public life and times. Nicolson’s book in particular did as much to confirm George’s reputation as a good king as it did to confirm his own reputation as a good writer, and established a model for royal biography successfully ...”

“... early English history which Every Schoolboy Knows – Alfred and the Cakes, Canute and the Waves, Harold and the Arrow – only the last has any claim to be in a real sense true (and even that has only recently been rescued from understandable scepticism by painstaking scholarship). The legends discussed in these books concern Robin Hood, the early history of ...”

“... on, the situation was very different, although economic expertise was no panacea for success: both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were far more aware of the economic problems of their time than Eden was of those in his. Yet neither was able to do much to solve them. Eden’s life spanned the years between the heyday of Britain’s imperial grandeur and her ...”

“... In 1964, Harold Wilson described the record of the (outgoing) Conservative government as ‘13 wasted years’. If the present Parliament lasts its full term – as seems likely – the electorate will be asked to pass judgment on 13 years of Labour rule. Voters today seem to have the same view of Labour as Wilson had of the Tories all those years ago ...”

“... Lies, whispered, of friends’ indiscretions; instances of envy – when we hate the people we love; peccadillos; filched office supplies; inflated expense accounts; violent obsessions of all kinds; reckless speeding; a fender bender whose scene we left; the belt from Macy’s we slipped into our own belt loops (they’re the easiest thing to take); a copy ...”

“... of acting with the person in question. ‘A sweetie? Are we talking about the same person?’ ‘Harold Pinter? Can you be serious?’ ‘She’s a bit …’ with a tipping of the elbow to indicate drink taken. I’ve often thought of putting such a session in a play, but unless the names of real actors are used it wouldn’t work.24 January. Watch a DVD of ...”

“... mergers. Many proved disastrous. Hamilton-Paterson is excellent on this. He has a real, critical love of cars, and clearly a passion for motorbikes: his chapter on Triumph and its merger with several other motorbike companies is vivid, knowledgeable and shocking. ‘A combination of appalling mismanagement, personal rivalries, union intransigence and sheer ...”

“... It’s an adroitly engineered terminal twist which turns us back to those questions about love, identity and nationality to which this novel is too intelligent and too humane to pretend to have easy answers. In Hidden in the Heart Foxborough manoeuvres Bested into becoming his biographer, and the novel’s narrator wonders if her dead lover has in ...”

“... plumbing was also pretty ancient. Ved shivered in his room but took comfort in the knowledge that Harold Macmillan had shivered there before him. (One day Macmillan dropped into his old quarters and found Mehta stretched out on a sofa. ‘He must think that the college has gone to the dogs.’) Would Ved’s co-students also take this view? At dinner he ...”

“... and elsewhere, is irredeemably obscure. Certain poetic properties – earth, air, the moon, blood, love, solitude, germination and the like – recur in combinations that begin to look merely kaleidoscopic. It is hard for the empirical English mind not to suspect Neruda of being a trifle slapdash in some of his effects: Felstiner’s earnest and cautious ...”

“... worked for handled opium as well as tea. This doesn’t come as a surprise; the bad character of Harold Anderson, his father’s boss, had been telegraphed early on: ‘that chap always gave me an uneasy feeling. Something fishy about him. There was something fishy about the whole damn business.’ Similarly, we are warned that there is ‘something ...”

“... them. What is in question is finding the suitable, the sufficient language for this conflict. When Harold Bloom writes with his useful (and usual) fervour about Eliot that ‘to have been born in 1888, and to have died in 1965, is to have flourished in the Age of Freud, hardly a time when Anglo-Catholic theology, social thought and morality were central to the ...”