“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and swam to your show. In goggles, snorkels and flippers we eddied at the deep end watching I Love Lucy.Dad, who was generally considered the king of Broadway comedy, had only the year before replaced Sid Caesar, the new king of TV comedy, in the national tour of the revue Make Mine Manhattan. Back then, the radio comedian Fred Allen joked, television was ...”

“... in blossom, No choral salutation lure to light A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night And love’s tired eyes and hands and barren bosom. There is no help for these things; none to mend, And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend, Will make death clear or make life durable.This is the 16th stanza in this vein; the litany of ‘no’ and ‘not’ (I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... every tier, in the whole assembled crush of Valdeners, carried on cantillated waves of explosive love, blasted with their gratitude for having been born Valdeners. Here, at the age of six, Azarya is happy. Growing up, he is mortally oppressed by the New Valdeners’ expectations. ‘Every time I hear how they call me, Azarya ha-kodesh, Azarya the holy ...”

“... may hear ‘Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,/Warble his native woodnotes wild’. Whatever Harold Bloomian Oedipal reasons one may impute for Milton’s decision to turn his towering literary precursor into an untaught rustic infant, somewhere between Pan and Puck, ‘L’Allegro’ established a tradition characterised by the invention of fanciful ...”

“... since, the rest of Fuller’s Roman saga – her revolutionary activities, her ‘fall’ into a love affair and unwed motherhood, and her fatal return journey to America – has attained its own mythic status, open to ridicule or heroworship. Vance avoids this. He insists that Fuller’s Roman encounters with Eros in no way denigrated or compromised what he ...”

“... is this hunger for ‘media exposure’ (as the spin doctors would call it) entirely due to self-love on the part of individual peers. For the thing that must eventually strike all visitors to the House of Lords is the obsession of its members, whether Labour or Tory, hereditary aristocrats or proletarian life peers, with the survival of the place in some ...”

“... political democracy. Strachey had two major weaknesses. The first was his empiricism. For all his love of argument and ideas, he was inclined, in the best traditions of the educational discipline in which he was brought up, to argue from the facts he saw around him as if they were never-changing. When capitalism seemed to be in an impasse in the ...”

“... a lovely wife, two lovely daughters and a lovely Porsche. Ralph is ‘a pragmatist ... more of a Harold Wilson than a Ted Heath man’. His life is taken up with the disposal of butter mountains and the regulation of green pounds. Everything has gone well for him. But ‘perhaps it had all been too easy or too well ordered: the safe degree at Oxford, the ...”

“... that makes one wonder whether the gap between the Tory Party of Margaret Thatcher and that of Harold Macmillan is greater than the gap between Macmillan and the third Marquess of Salisbury? We shall probably not know until she has gone whether Mrs Thatcher was an erratic episode, a mutant, a comet-like irruption, or a genuine revolutionary who left as ...”

“... Hungarian Plain, a camp of gypsies, Great Bustards in Vesztö, the Archduke Joseph in Békéscaba, love-making (I divine) with some girl in Transylvania. Leigh Fermor’s method is to share cognition with the objects that provoke it. Not the ‘pathetic fallacy’, by which natural objects are called upon to be hospitable to one’s mood, but the cognitive ...”

“... most rigidly safeguarded. Personal experience obliges me to agree with him that ‘the love of indirection, the cosiness of a tight personal élite, and the sheer self-importance of government servants, find their clearest expression in the intelligence community.’ In the course of my lengthy researches into the weirdly mixed social and political ...”