“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was deep and revealing, and Gilmour might with advantage have developed it further. Curzon’s love affair with the East began with his first, post-graduation, tour – of Greece, Palestine and Syria – in which he contrasted the impressively bronzed, handsome, powerfully masculine rural and desert peoples with the degenerate townsmen. It was in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was a debonair and melancholy old gentleman in his eighties with a slight, drooping resemblance to Harold Macmillan. Since 1919, he had lived as a ward of psychoanalysis, receiving small retainers from Freud, and then from the Freud Society. An American analyst, Muriel Gardiner, befriended him in 1938, and with great devotion and persistence, managed to ...”

“... the Police Department who specialises in strip-searching delinquent Mexican males, but finds true love in the arms of Big John, a massively-endowed black drug-pusher. There are riots and burning in the barrios, a fixed election, a major kidnapping, and a good old American assassination by a ‘lone crazed killer’ who keeps a picture of Jodie Foster in his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of politics and sees hilarity in its tiny events. He knows his subjects (‘James Callaghan, the Harold Wilson of politics’). He knows that Mr Healey is clever, and will therefore lose the argument. And he reminds us that Mr Heseltine is ‘a blonde’. Johnson quotes his namesake, the good Doctor, on taking care to see ‘that the Whig dogs should not ...”