“... he had sent his son Euan to the Oratory, despite the inevitable political flak, said: ‘Look at Harold Wilson’s children.’ The journalist demurred: one of Wilson’s sons had become a headmaster, the other a university professor. Blair replied that he certainly hoped his children would do better than that. Since we hardly try to block that kind of ...”

“... has coloured my entire life and works,’ Fitzgerald declared in a letter to his literary agent, Harold Ober. But it wasn’t just money: Brown’s biography shows the ways in which he consistently favoured the aristocratic, the premodern and romantic. As a child, he loved to pretend he was the foundling son of a medieval monarch, denying his parentage (like ...”

“... the achievements of Socrates, Jesus Christ or St Francis on a world scale. It is true that perfect love casteth out fear: it happens again and again at the individual level. Most people, even if they have never felt anything like that themselves, have probably glimpsed somebody else feeling something like that. (Or is this too optimistic?) After World War Two ...”

“... rule: She has a special stature of her own – One can only believe in Russia. This intertwined love and hate of the motherland, this obsessive fascination with the concept and essence of Russianness, coupled with an unrelenting inquiry into the future and destiny of the country – ‘Whither do you gallop, proud horse, and where do you put your ...”

“... to one of the older boys. One day, as he was jumping from one parapet to another like a miniature Harold Lloyd, he ‘missed the parapet and started hurtling through the air. But, as I had on so many other occasions, I saved myself from a fall – this time by catching hold of a brick projection.’   When Mamaji came to hear of the incident, she forbade ...”

“... not to the baronage: to the exam-passing classes, rather than to the order-giving ones. To use Harold Macmillan’s classification, he was a ‘gownsman’, not a ‘swordsman’. Unfortunately, he did not pass his exams well enough to be a really confident gownsman. He was an Oppidan at Eton, not a Colleger; a closed exhibitioner at King’s, not a ...”

“... Sir Gerald Nabarro once said that without his moustache he might be mistaken for a nobody like Harold Wilson; behind his formidable moustache and haughty stare Kitchener was as scheming and ambitious a self-publicist as ever wore uniform. That poster was his apogee: it might as accurately have been captioned ‘Your Country Needs ME.’ From the moment ...”

“... gave way to a sense of the advantages. For a start the voters might have fallen a little out of love with the idea of electoral reform. Proportional representation is a quick fix to whatever is wrong with the British democratic process. And the unseemly negotiations to fix up this coalition, where party manifestos become pick-and-mix bargaining ...”

“... in distinguished company: Byron refers to ‘Belgium’s capital’ in the third canto of Childe Harold. If Pitt’s career during the last eight years of his life was in decline, he remained the master of the House of Commons. When he sat down in November 1797 after what a contemporary called ‘a most spirited speech to rally opinion’, the whole House ...”

“... who started out as a Cornish scholarship girl and rose to become a senior civil servant under Harold Wilson and Edward Heath and, later, a top executive at breakfast television – has written a memoir of her rise to the top of the British establishment. Sentence by sentence, her story is likeable and impressive but never very exciting to read. Most of ...”

“... because, being mentally as well as physically blind, he did not understand that in their day to love a young man was the equivalent (Socrates’ jokes reveal this more clearly than Plato’s theories) of keeping a dancing-girl before getting married in ours’. One reason homosexuality, in the Christian era, has often been a scourge and misery to people ...”

“... poem by Heine, “Der Asra”’. Fitzgerald’s fourth novel, on the face of it a tragicomedy of love and loss among careworn bosses and dewy office girls at the wartime BBC, resonated, in its author’s mind at least, with a poem in which a Yemeni slave explains how, for the people he comes from, to love is to die. We are ...”

“... life’; he didn’t keep up with reviews or gossip. He told Poirier that when he first visited Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in London in 1913, he’d had no idea who the Imagists were. ‘You should know your fellow countryman, Ezra Pound,’ Monro said. ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Frost replied.It was an odd narrative to insist on, given that ...”

“... so many José Arcadios, even with some Remedios and Amarantas thrown in on the distaff side. Harold Bloom is right to complain of ‘a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is crammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb’. I would add to this an embarrassment the literary commentator is loath to confess, namely ...”

“... Harold Stanley Ede​ , who was known for most of his life as Jim, lived through nearly the whole of the 20th century. Born in 1895, he died in 1990, having, as his modest epitaph in St Peter’s church in Cambridge puts it, ‘created Kettle’s Yard and helped to preserve this church’. Kettle’s Yard, the house and gallery that still holds Ede’s collection of 20th-century art, as well as hosting exhibitions and concerts, is the place where generations of undergraduates, including me and, somewhat later, Laura Freeman, first encountered the work of Miró and David Jones, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Gaudier-Brzeska and others ...”