“... 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 ...”

“... time the speaker has fallen completely – perhaps the right word is “irretrievably” – in love. The object of his love was a young man who soon afterwards met his death, it would seem by drowning.’ When Eliot learned of this ‘new interpretation’ of his most famous poem, he at once instructed his solicitors to ...”

“... Hotel’. It was where she worked. Funny the sign hasn’t faded more. Tourists must love it. Proof if you need proof. He got two books out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to ...”

“... after 1947 involved the ignis fatuus of a powerful British presence East of Suez. As late as 1965, Harold Wilson declared that Britain’s frontier was on the Himalayas. Cruel mayhem in Palestine, the debacle at Suez, inglorious doings in Cyprus and Aden, were all largely the result of this mirage. Brutality and illegality marred the superficially successful ...”

“... the ambiguities of the writing, as when ‘I am experiencing a grief reaction for Mother’s love’ becomes ‘I am experiencing a grief reaction for [the loss of] Mother’s love.’ The discussion of the court case provides a fascinating example of the way a ‘legal conception of evidence finds itself up against a ...”

“... not write and an English-speaking French woman would not write, ‘To my husband, who I would love even if he were not my husband’ – Who whom? Would should? Howard Spring’s Heaven lies about us is subjected to a parenthetical tutting: ‘A childhood autobiography, as the title implies (although, to be pedantic, the original Wordsworth quotation was ...”

“... it as the natural order. Edward’s choice to put his desires first, especially for romantic love, which Pope-Hennessy’s interviewees agreed in varying terms was something his mother knew little about, was an affront to her entire worldview. It cast imperial Britain in a bad light, or as she put it to Wyndham, ‘This might really be ...”

“... death from emphysema she watched in California in 1980 (this is the book to give a smoker you love for Christmas) was a lost, wasted man whose misery and sense of exile stare hauntingly out of the book’s last photograph. The explanation for that change does not lie in the years during which it took place. To account for it, Mrs Tynan had to go back to ...”

“... gives a woman a moment of freedom in which she can escape her assigned role (Hester Oakley’s ‘Love in a Fog’, in which an unrecognised princess connects with an unknown stranger who rescues her in the street, is a graceful example). H.G. Wells, in Love and Mr Lewisham (1899), describes how fog turns ‘every yard of ...”

“... actually does the splitting. Indeed one of the curious things about, say, self-reproach, or self-love, is that it assumes that one part of the self is virtually omniscient, really knows best. We are not lacking in authority in these moments of abjection or smugness. Selves, in other words, are always split hierarchically, in terms of internal power ...”

“... saw an opportunity to annex Iran. Lord Curzon, now foreign secretary and convinced, as Harold Nicolson put it, that ‘God had personally selected the British upper class as an instrument of the Divine Will,’ drew up an Anglo-Persian agreement which was almost entirely destructive of Iranian sovereignty. Mossadegh is said to have wept when he ...”

“... get a mention – just general wisdom, and a little bleak at that. Apparently if you didn’t have love you weren’t shit, that’s what I took away from it: you weren’t shit and you didn’t have shit and you didn’t know shit and you get the rest of the picture when you’re dead – the glass darkly thing. Like, where do I sign up? ‘No, my brother ...”

“... an experience that was at once intimate and formative, on a par with, even part of, the history of love. But reading is, for the most part (at least in recent centuries), a private activity. What can we know of all those quiet hours that have left so little direct trace in the historical record? The literary tradition yields some evidence for select members of ...”

“... pass, and many glasses, before they go to the races and have ‘a whiskey and soda apiece’. My love for the book only increases as it gets a little closer to Brief Encounter. ‘I guess we’re both conceited,’ I said. ‘But you are brave.’ ‘No. But I hope to be.’ ‘We’re both brave,’ I said. ‘And I’m very brave when I’ve had a ...”

“... dosed Byron with the elevated Wordsworthian feelings that made it into the third canto of Childe Harold (‘to me/High mountains are a feeling’ and so on), but Byron himself quickly came to recognise that he had been momentarily taken over by a voice not his own. ‘As to “Don Juan” – confess – confess – you dog and be candid that it is the ...”