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“... traces, like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our ...”

“... piece for New Society in 1976. Her roots were quite confusing, as most people’s are. Her father, Hugh Stalker, was a Scottish working-class boy made good, a journalist who worked nights at the Press Association in Fleet Street. She described her mother, Olive Farthing, as being ‘from the examination-passing working classes’, meaning that she had won a ...”

“... from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it ...”

“... the errant young man from the Singapore Stock Exchange, is interviewed in his Frankfurt prison by David Frost, the interview, made by Frost’s production company, broadcast by the BBC at ten this evening. The papers, which have had a preview, are full of Leeson’s self-justifications, but nobody seems to question the propriety of broadcasting such an ...”

“... employment. Aimed primarily at Asia and Central/Eastern Europe, the scheme was commended by David Blunkett as proof that the Government was ‘delivering nothing less than one of the world’s most flexible modern work permit systems. To maintain a buoyant economy we need to ensure employers can quickly fill key posts where shortages exist.’ This ...”

“... Many readers will sense something odd about such reliance on a vision predating not only David Hume and Adam Smith, but Darwin, Freud, Marx and Durkheim, from an age when genes and the structure of human DNA were undreamt of. Can philosophy really be so timeless? The answer is plainly yes, provided a sufficiently passionate sermon can be extracted ...”

“... quickly, and aloud.’ (The faux-solicitous note recalls one of his best jokes, in a review of David Lodge’s Working with Structuralism: ‘His title,’ Carey said, ‘has a making-the-best-of-it ring, rather like “Surviving with Sciatica”.’) Based on this account, there is not much doubt where his own preference in the 20th century lies and it is ...”

“... of piano wire. Very soon after I came, there was a general election. Harold Wilson had replaced Hugh Gaitskell as leader of the Labour Party and was soon to become prime minister. I canvassed for Labour in 1964. At Private Eye, where I used to spend a lot of time, Richard Ingrams said: ‘Why don’t you compile “The Thoughts of Chairman Harold”? Just ...”

“... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...”

“... by Mrs Thatcher but now wholly outmoded.24 October. Judy Egerton sends me Among Booksellers by David Batterham. Batterham is a second-hand bookseller and the book a collection of letters to Howard Hodgkin from the places, some of them quite far-flung, where book-buying has taken him. There are letters from Spain, Finland, provincial France and even ...”

“... had had it up to here with the Barcelona telephone exchange. In The Spanish Civil War (2001), Hugh Thomas tells of an anarchist phone operator interrupting a call from the president of the Republic to his counterpart in Catalonia and announcing that ‘lines should be used for more important purposes than a talk between the two presidents.’ The POUM ...”

“... cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics’.He also joined the Fabians, encouraged by Hugh Dalton, the postwar Labour chancellor. He took it seriously, did a lot of reading, especially about the Webbs’ Minority Report on Poor Law reform, and in the summer of 1910, at the end of his year as president of the Cambridge society, he and Dudley Ward ...”

“... hero of Balzac and Stendhal, the figure in Henry James confronting her destiny, Madame Bovary or David Copperfield or even Moby Dick now became the unread or the unwritten book or the newly discovered passage, or the section where the author has lost control, or given up. In Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet our hero muses: ‘Why should I care that no one ...”

“... by many readers, but it was nonetheless Milton’s founding intention in composing his epic. As David Norbrook shows in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England ...”

“... With shaggy hide & sharp nose scrowed with black Roots in the bushes & the woods & makes A great hugh burrow in the ferns & brakes With nose on ground he runs a awkard pace & anything will beat him in the race ‘Shaggy’ was used by Milton, Gray and others to abrade the Latinate, full-vowelled melody of their verse and, particularly in the late Augustan ...”