“... and it crops up in depictions of funerals and memorial services in contemporary fiction. Alan Bennett’s ‘The Laying on of Hands’ opens in a High Anglican church, St Andrew Upchance near Shoreditch, for the star-studded funeral of Clive Dunlop, ‘quite young – 34 according to the dates given on the front of the Order of Service’, but ...”

“... as I remarked, because in so many other contexts we are adjured not to be ‘judgmental’. Even Alan Bennett in this journal, friendliest of Larkin’s reviewers, found Larkin’s family situation and father ‘grotesque’ because of the father’s pro-Nazi views. But in those days eccentrics flourished, and views of all kinds were taken to be one’s own ...”

“... the treason drum and making the mistake writers on the spies always make: that the whole lives of Burgess, Blunt, Maclean and Co were taken up with spying. Maybe they should have been and had they been dutiful Marxists ought to have been. But spies have lives too, and were (even Blunt) often quite silly and like everybody else out to have a good time. Arthur ...”

“... In Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution, Anthony Blunt instructs Her Majesty the Queen about pictures. ‘Because something is not what it is said to be, Ma’am, does not mean it is a fake.’ ‘What is it?’ she asks. Sir Anthony gingerly suggests: ‘An enigma?’ Here as in Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood, the figure of the spy illustrates the irreducibility of human and aesthetic mystery, the contradictions that all personalities enshrine, the confusion that no amount of pedantic energy can resolve ...”

“... William Empson was stirred to an opposite kind of ire by one of many hack works, The Traitors by Alan Moorehead, who ‘specifically denounced them for having had the impudence to obey their own consciences’, instead of understanding that a citizen’s duty is ‘to concur with any herd in which he happens to find himself. The old Protestant in me ...”

“... Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher Wordsworth(Guardian)UnfavourablePaul Ableman(Spectator)Robert Cottrell(Financial Times)Martyn Goff(Daily Telegraph)John Osborne(New Standard)John Sutherland(London Review of Books)Auberon Waugh(Daily Mail)In all three ...”

“... who had even liked the play, relating it to her own experiences in Moscow, where she had met Guy Burgess, and giving me, ready plotted, another play in An Englishman Abroad.1 December. A card from a friend, Paul Fincham, drawing my attention to a passage in Kilvert’s Diary (which I thought I’d read).New Year’s Day 1882. I went to London by the midday ...”

“... of TB in 1944, when he was 52, screaming that Maugham had ruined his life. His place was taken by Alan Searle, working-class, an autodidact, dependable but dull, whom Maugham put to work as his factotum running the Villa Mauresque, the Moorish folly on Cap Ferrat he had bought in 1926 and ran like a grand hotel. Searle was devoted, but Maugham, increasingly ...”

“... to other scholars. The result was that the unofficial biographies by Chris Bryant (1997) and Simon Burgess (1999) – whose quality Clarke graciously acknowledges – were written without access to Cripps’s personal papers. This was unfortunate. In general, Clarke writes, the exclusion blighted rather than fostered scholarship. ‘Dame Isobel’s ...”

“... you will be delighted to know that a pub in the Yorkshire town of Otley is to be renamed the Alan Bennett in your honour in order to celebrate Yorkshire Day.’ Fortunately this bizarre baptism is only for a month; were it longer I fear it would soon be reflected in the takings. The body responsible for this kindly gesture is the Otley Pub Club, which ...”

“... and Tati. (Anyone who doubts the honesty and pathos Sellers brought to the part should check out Alan Arkin’s dreadful Inspector Clouseau in the eponymous 1968 movie.) Of course it must be easy to allow such memories to be erased by the succession of lazy, self-indulgent performances he turned out throughout the late Sixties and Seventies. By the time he ...”

“... history might have been adumbrated by means of this particular figure: a delinquent one. Burgess or Blunt would have fitted the bill. But it’s clear that Hughes has been chary of apportioning waywardness to anyone other than his hero, Aitken-Bunter, to avoid displacing the classic Owl from the centre of the stage. Some decided liberties are taken ...”

“... range of people than he might have met elsewhere. His colleagues and BBC contemporaries included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC ...”

“... his case was considered of the highest possible priority. This was the time (two years before Burgess and Maclean absconded) when hugely damaging intelligence was haemorrhaging to the Soviet Union. Until MI5 interest began to wane in the mid-1950s, every letter to our house and James’s firm was opened and copied, every phone call was monitored, nearly ...”

“... of Fortunes of War, the 1987 TV version of her two trilogies set in the Second World War (Anthony Burgess, a fan, called them a hexateuch), was the visual sumptuousness: the arrival in Bucharest of the train carrying the young British Council teacher and his new wife; the Athens settings of the wife’s romance with one British officer and her scrambles up ...”