“... than 700 pages – but it serves as a taster for the many volumes of collected letters which I hope are still to come. When those letters are published Hughes should be established with Keats, Hopkins, the early Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop as one of the most important letter-writing poets. The Selected Letters is sensitively and meticulously edited by ...”

“... the masses what the masses need.In their attempt to understand today’s post-democratic politics, Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti note overlooked commonalities between technocracy and populism which, they argue, allow for an unlikely synthesis between the two. Both involve the replacement of an old elite, one that is seen as technically ...”

“... stepped down as chair and trustee of Ark Schools last April, after the campaign group Hope Not Hate reported that his locked X account, @aeropagus123, had repeatedly liked or reposted far-right, homophobic and Islamophobic tweets. One of the tweets Marshall endorsed, according to Hope Not Hate, said that ...”

“... he worked for a City bank in order to ‘make my pile’. He wrote to his uncle, with what we may hope was a degree of irony, that he knew money couldn’t buy happiness but that it could buy ‘cars, yachts, expensive holidays’ and security, and these things, he explained, would make him happy. He reckoned that a large part of success in finance – 20 per ...”

“... though she was the bishop’s wife, she enjoyed working as an usherette in the theatre and thus (I hope) scandalising that Trollopean place.17 September. Edward Albee dies. We met once, I think in 1972, when we were seated at the same table at the Evening Standard awards lunch. I was struck by how stylish and Ivy League he was (like Woody Allen, who wore ...”

“... and extremely sad. As Brown says towards the end of it, ‘It is Cinderella in reverse. It is hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled. Nothing is as thrilling as they said it would be; no one is as amusing, as clever, as attractive or as interesting.’You feel the sadness all the more not because the princess is such an endearing character but ...”

“... 1900s offered the seigneur (William Collings, father of Dame Sybil) £30,000 for the island in the hope of establishing one. Indeed, the Collings family had won the island in 1852 because the then seigneur had mortgaged the fief to them, having lost all his money pursuing ‘Sark’s Hope’, an elusive silver-mining ...”

“... of the war on terror and its advocates (one of his early books was subtitled ‘The Trial of Christopher Hitchens’), then of the economic austerity that followed the 2008 crash. Like Hitchens, Seymour is a former Trotskyite; he left the Socialist Workers Party in 2013 when it imploded over allegations of sexual assault by a senior member. Unlike ...”

“... that are understood: ‘The participants … know that this is a transaction in which we both hope to get something more than we intend to give … Nobody pretends to befriend anyone so there can be no question of betrayal. It is perhaps somewhat hard-headed transaction but not I am sure a morally ambiguous one.’ I remember clearly when Lynn Barber ...”

“... feature of this wilfulness. ‘I must begin by apologising to Professor Ricks,’ his piece about Christopher Ricks’s book on Tennyson begins. ‘What follows is less a review of his excellent book, the best study of Tennyson I have read, than a series of personal reflections on the poet suggested to me by reading it.’ Maybe something of the sort is more ...”

“... first of all accepting it.’ This should give pause to those in the post-Communist world who hope that some kind of simple restoration of the old pre-Communist regimes might still be possible, that the heritage of Communism can simply be put in brackets. In France, the Revolutionary tradition died a slow, agonising death between 1789 and 1871, and when ...”

“... now give to the expanding universe. Prophecy on the basis of Biblical chronology offered crumbs of hope in a world at war and in political chaos. Chronology, in short, mattered. It is not surprising that, as Scaliger wrote to Calvisius, no Frankfurt book-fair passed without its new crop of chronologies. As Grafton observes, however, the very name ...”

“... is it that would ‘make a smart 16-year-old stop for a minute and think’? ‘Nothing, now, I hope. But to fall in love with a wonderful woman and to talk to her quietly in the night will do wonders.’ Feynman won his prize – shared with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga – for ‘fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics (QED), with ...”

“... to totality turns into cynicism. The only argument for the war against Iraq was repeatedly put by Christopher Hitchens: the majority of Iraqis were victims of Saddam and were glad to get rid of him. To this majority, the caution expressed by Western liberals could only appear deeply hypocritical. A typical middle-class Western leftist has no right to despise ...”

“... of royalty. Cairo, 19 January. Early at Cairo Airport, we wander round the departure lounge where Christopher S. discovers a museum. It’s just one room, looking out onto the tarmac, and has a score or so of showcases of various periods – Ancient Egypt, the Copts, the Mamelukes – with only a few exhibits in each: a wooden tablet of a saint in ...”