“... with Kissinger, ‘in poor form: bitter at the attacks on him from his own side and indignant over William Shawcross’s vendetta against him’, or suffering, like Heath, ‘from post-power frustration’. His observations of Henry and Nancy Kissinger are among his better examples of the higher gossip: I am reading Kissinger’s book with intense pleasure ...”

“... the same as that of light. British natural philosophers, led by the prodigious Glasgow professor William Thomson, liked this kind of model, because they reckoned dynamical machinery was uniquely comprehensible and informative. Trained to think in terms of the physics of gyroscopes, pulleys, pumps, calf’s-foot jelly or rubber bands, they extended this ...”

“... than they will tolerate an attempt to steer the party away from socialism – the attempt on which William Rodgers and David Owen seem to be embarked, and which has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but without either ...”

“... and Mr Round to be no gentleman’ is also in a tone not characteristic of his biographer. The broad conceptual sweeps that went into writing ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’ are also ones in which Maitland did not much indulge. Where the two historians are closest is in their picture of Parliaments, what they were, and what they were for, and ...”

“... enough. Even when writing those diverting and malicious short stories his eye had been on ‘the broad fields of the Continental novel’. To have the freedom of these fields while preserving the great richness of our own social, ethical tradition ought to be the ultimate aim of the serious English novelist today. Good and evil are the touchstones. It is in ...”

“... at the time, one can sometimes imagine him as a young Anglo-Saxon, rather like the narrator in William Gerhardie’s novel Futility, standing unobtrusively to the side of the action, a little in love with the lives he’s describing and at the same time worried about these people on whom so many difficulties have been inflicted, his grandmother ...”

“... the author follows the glow in the dark across the work of several novelists – Remarque, Mailer, William Styron, Hemingway – confirms this. ‘I have noted all the cigarettes that are crushed out, thrown away or unlit at night, shared and hoarded, detested and loved – instruments of torture and surgery, tokens of friendship and signs of love – in ...”

“... tendency to think in terms of dramatic absolutes. A crude version of this argument can be found in William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a relentless piece of Nazi pedigree-hunting with some claim to be considered, despite strong competition, the worst book ever written on German history. Others have argued more subtly for the role played by ...”

“... particularly science-fiction fans, but Hubbard assured them he was interpreting religion in broad, humanist terms: ‘Before you say, “Religion, grrrr,” think of that – it is a practical religion and religion is the oldest heritage that Man has.’ Urban does not argue, as other writers have, that it was all a financial ploy, though he agrees that ...”

“... to music texts recalled from memory. Friends were soon killed, or reported killed. When the poet William Harvey, with whom he had had an intense friendship, was taken prisoner but presumed dead, Gurney wrote ‘To His Love’: ‘with thick-set/Masses of memoried flowers –/Hide that red wet/Thing I must somehow forget.’ A corporal with whom he had fallen ...”

“... house in suburban Cheshire, most of my pocket money went on books – Billy Bunter, Jennings, William, War Picture Library, Biggles, Arthur Ransome, bird books. In the 1950s I used to order Puffin books by post from the catalogue, the pleasure of unwrapping the parcel rivalling the discovery of a new book in a Christmas stocking. For my ninth or tenth ...”

“... become human. Mothers’ and babies’ calculations of love reflect the law proposed by the late William Hamilton, a creative genius of sociobiology. (Hamilton died this year of malaria contracted in the Congo, where he was pursuing his latest ideas on the transmission of disease between species – arguably a martyr to his own passion for truth.) Hamilton ...”

“... the ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ that separated ministers and civil servants from ‘the broad mass of the British public’. Ordinary MPs and the press thought they had a better grasp of popular opinion, but they may not have done. This was a serious matter: if the government was to take the people along with it, it had to know how they felt and ...”

“... in vogue, so were many other things.’ Hard to argue with that. The thesis clearly reflects broad historical realities to the extent that cultural production got overshadowed by the long-arriving Second World War. The more the international situation became a cause for despair, the more tempting it became to concentrate your attention on your own ...”

“... having more information? (Questions like this abound in the law. Agreement on the balance is rare. William Blackstone thought it better for ten guilty men to escape criminal sanction than for one innocent man to be convicted. Matthew Hale put the ratio at five to one, Benjamin Franklin at a hundred to one. Bismarck, customarily robust, thought Blackstone had ...”