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“... drift amicably apart. All he feels is pity for their little daughter. He has affairs, but they peter out. As for his career: ‘I didn’t see myself in any of the roles I had seen lawyers play at Hanna’s trial. Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defence, and judging was the most grotesque oversimplification of all.’ So he moves ...”

“... dark gentleman ever to speak of it, but it bears a resemblance to that of Queen Victoria and John Brown, her favourite ghillie. Barbara Cartland, of course, could have made something of it. She was very pre-Oprah, and pre-Diana (her step-granddaughter), in believing it quite jolly for gels to be independent and bolters and all that, so long as they submitted ...”

“... have struggled to turn a profit; many have ended up at one point or another in unscrupulous hands. Peter Cook’s venture, the Establishment, was taken over by gangsters in 1963; in 1972 John Aspinall sold the Clermont to Playboy as its main London casino. In 1976, George Marks, a jovial Canadian-American property developer with a silver Rolls-Royce, offered ...”

“... Surrealism’, ‘Guernica’ (in 1937 Picasso’s latest) and ‘Cross-shaft at Codford St Peter, Wiltshire. Early ninth century (photos John Piper)’. ‘Of course we were as poor as church mice,’ Piper assured me once, with Myfanwy nodding agreement. Poor but busy, they were flush enough to buy a secondhand Lancia and roam the country seeking ...”

“... at the Foreign Office nursery, she clenched her teeth in fear that passing figures – including Peter Mandelson, ‘the ever elegant, sharp-suited paragon of style’ – would recognise her. She needn’t have worried: in her uniform, she was invisible. Mandy glanced, gave ‘half a nod’, then looked away. A sense that all good things were out of reach ...”

“... with eyes like a painted phoenix and eyebrows like willow leaves? O-lan’s ‘hair was rough and brown and unoiled’, ‘her face was large and flat and coarse-skinned, and her features too large altogether and without any sort of beauty or light.’ For gargoyle value, the New Republic found ‘an Oriental’ to review the novel, who refused to sanction ...”

“... of Shadows, though very readable and clear in detail, lacks the overall narrative clarity of Peter Hopkirk’s studies of the subject, most notably The Great Game (1990). The essential truth about Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia is that, despite the imperialist fantasies entertained by some of the Game’s players, there was never all that much at ...”

“... hostility other than to fawn. There are other recognisable names. Kinnock was very dependent on Peter Mandelson: when Mandelson resigned as director of communications in order to stand for Hartlepool Kinnock ‘almost literally’ hopped with rage. He thought Mandelson ‘irreplaceable’; without him Walworth Road would ‘collapse’. And there are the ...”

“... A raised stage, three metres long, about a metre high, is dressed with a flimsy backdrop of beige, brown, grey; here and there are torn swatches of yellow, green and maroon. At first we seem to see an austere Kurt Schwitters collage from the early 1920s. Close up, we discover unadorned cardboard, plain or coloured card. The wings of the stage are decorated ...”

“... the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end ...”

“... is the collection now housed in Amherst.) Dickinson, Bingham explains, wrote on backs of brown-paper bags or of discarded bills, programmes, and invitations; on tiny scraps of stationery pinned together; on leaves torn from old notebooks (one such sheet dated ‘1824’); on soiled and mildewed subscription blanks, or on department or drug-store ...”

“... of ice-cream, almost perfectly round a moment ago, dissolve slowly in even, hybrid trickles of brown and white. I watched movement, myself unmoving, my eyes fixed on the dish. My hands lay stiff on the table, and I tried with all my might to keep still, to hold onto immobility. But I could feel motion oozing over my body too. The immobile is in a ...”

“... in order ‘to protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland permanently part of ...”

“... details: the Shipman is riding awkwardly, wears a knee-length cloak of Irish cloth, is tanned deep brown and has a dagger tucked under his arm. Then come some professional facts: he has drunk a good deal of wine on the journeys to and from Bordeaux when his merchant client hasn’t been watching, he fights hard and has no scruples about throwing his opponents ...”

“... and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last year, each time gathering in new collections and ...”