“... colours and water drops spilled from all the trees as innumerable as petals. ‘I told you it was nice,’ Sylvie said. Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. But of course we do not suppose – whatever the ...”

“... might just get a belly-laugh or two at the Apollo. On Charles himself, there is a handful of quite nice ideas: having him always speak in the third person, arranging for a part of his chin to be swapped by plastic surgery with a part of Anne’s nose (Philip’s advice here: ‘By all means rub your new chin but don’t pick it’), making him slavishly follow ...”

“... in which Uriah Heep – ‘looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight’ – explains to David Copperfield the experiences that showed him the value of being ’umble. ‘Dickens was a great connoisseur of hypocrisy,’ she writes, ‘yet he was not obsessive about it ... Why has his sense of humanity been so rare? Why are people so overwhelmed by ...”

“... poet is another way of saying the book is incomplete. Finally, his argument that we must all be nice to one another, and tolerant, and not resort to ‘rhetoric’, is Jack Hornerish and a good death-recipe for the future discussion of English poetry. Of the books by individual poets, James Merrill’s Mirabell: Books of Number is a maddening expenditure of ...”

“... sea, one looks back to Beaverbrook with nostalgia for a better class of monster – a pretty nice monster much of the time and at any rate an interesting one. Significantly, the chaste (but not dull) Rupert Murdoch prints semi-dirt and pursues a certain political line because in large social groups the breasts of Samantha Fox and the opinions of Margaret ...”

“... the theatre of a state opening of Parliament, featuring such kenspeckle figures as ‘Sir David Frost arriving to exchange a word with his father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal’, and the Earl Marshal pointing out the patriotic wall paintings to his French guests and saying: ‘Vous voyez? Agincourt. Autre victoire pour nous. Victoire ...”

“... off. He was sure Cowdrey had fought for his selection. Oborne gives a different picture, of a nice guy who found it hard to tell uncomfortable truths and tended not to deliver on his promises. Cowdrey’s main wish seems to have been that the tour should go ahead, and according to Doug Insole, another selector, he made it ‘clear that on balance he ...”

“... but the book was also filled with examples of that attractive canny madness which R.D. Laing and David Cooper were analysing as higher wisdom. Stigma told me about the nature of outsiders, ways of not belonging which redeemed my sense of not belonging, and The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life made sense of more or less everything, but especially the ...”

“... had the idea that I should say something about his professional life at his funeral. It was a very nice idea and I’m glad – not to say flattered – that he had it. But I found it a spookily hard thing to do. ‘Spooky’ because every time I thought I had a point to make I heard myself checking it with John – ‘Is that right?’ ‘Can I say ...”

“... content started in 2017 by Tim Montgomerie, who also founded ConservativeHome.) ‘So that was nice,’ Kingsnorth continued, looking sad.Around the same time, Kingsnorth said, he was ‘stalked’ by Christ and has now converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. He’s done a talk about it, ‘What Is There Left to Conserve?’, also available on the ...”

“... holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and publishing world for some time – I and my stories are completely banned by the BBC as far as children ...”

“... to get me off her hands. She wrote once or twice later to say that she was going out with a very nice Italian in the restaurant business. The picture told of a tall, dark man in his thirties, smiling at the camera with my mother behind it. In another letter she asked if I’d had any Valentine cards. She’d had ten. No, I said. I hadn’t had ...”

“... the claws were bared less often. These extracts, chosen by Benson’s splendid biographer, David Newsome, from among the four million words of the diaries Benson left as his memorial, are taken from a period in Benson’s life when he was uncertain and hypersensitive, so the claws are out. It was at the turn of the century, and Benson, having been ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the ...”