“... from Apuleius in Latin fails to slake his fires and a song or two on the guitar fans them. ‘Some day some man will kill you, I suppose,’ cries Paul, ‘but I shall be your lover first.’ At this the temptress affects bewildered surprise, ‘as a child might do who sets light to a whole box of matches in play. What a naughty, naughty toy to burn so ...”

“... himself, with an eye to party politics, recruited able young socialists like Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay. The diaries reveal the many points of conflict between the career Civil Service and the outsiders. There were quarrels about honours: were the temporaries entitled to them? And there were differences over policy. One of Dalton’s pet ideas at the ...”

“... his eloquence, wit and rakishness; he had figured in the greatest civil trial of his times, the ‘Douglas Cause’ over the rightful inheritance of one of Scotland’s most powerful dynasties. But there remained something amateurish about his approach to the law. Boswell worked hard enough on his briefs, but, as his colleagues felt, he took everything too ...”

“... How sane, how wise!’ I am the mirror where your image moves, Neat and obedient twin, until one day It moves before you move; and it is you Who have to ape its moods and motions, who Must now obey. That’s Tessimond’s take on the popular press, and like his poems on advertising and money and the silver screen and the various types who feature in his ...”

“... the room I used to work in And from time to time You look up to see if I am watching you. To this day Your arms are full of the wild flowers You were most in love with. As often with Hamilton, the poem works as much by what it doesn’t say as what it does: the happiness it commemorates is no longer present for the participants, or so we assume from the ...”

“... the sentiments here are too easy; in ‘Description’, he writes: ‘I love the language/of the day’s ten thousand aspects.’ In ‘At the Boatyard’: What I love at the boatyard, at the end of Good Templar Place, is the scraped, accidental intensity of colour. In ‘To the Storm God’: ‘I love the wet ideograms/scrawling the houseboat.’ In ...”

“... admiration of his achievement and to distil his improvised responses to the problems of his own day as timeless watchwords of wisdom. Defiance, which served the British well enough in 1940, subsequently became a mantra for a nation in denial about its reduced place in the world, with, as time passed, increasingly bizarre acts of atavistic self-assertion to ...”

“... it was entirely her own fault. At which point the Treasury (Major, Lamont) and the Foreign Office (Douglas Hurd) realised that Thatcher was so weak, and so desperate to avoid yet more interest rate increases, that if they wanted to push her into the ERM, now was the time to do it. In this spirit she was told that a judicious series of leaks suggesting that ...”

“... Sue said, ‘and died the kind of death you would not wish on a rabid dog.’ On his last day, Bob asked her if everything was ‘sorted’ financially: ‘I lied and told him we’d be fine, and a few minutes later he died.’ Sue couldn’t face going to the place where his ashes were scattered: she told Caroline Wheeler that she never would ...”

“... how tenaciously Americans remember’ – or more to the point misremember – ‘that day of infamy’. Three months later, 9/11 gave us a Pearl Harbor redux far worse than Dower could have imagined. That politicians should draw an analogy between a surprise attack by four hijacked planes manned by 20 terrorists belonging to a non-state ...”

“... the philosophical works, had to drop out because of illness, and the role of his other colleague, Douglas Denon Heath, was limited to editing the legal works. The result ranks among the greatest works of Victorian scholarship. Thomas Carlyle called it ‘the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy work I have ever met with in this ...”

“... enormous faith in Boeing’s future prospects. The shares of its nearest equivalent, McDonnell Douglas, were by contrast selling at only 15 times earnings, while the price-earnings ratio for General Electric, that great battleship of corporate America, was only 19. In that same week, a survey of members of the International Association of Machinists and ...”

“... Seventies and Eighties half-obliterating surviving brick-clad structures that were giants in their day, and spelling out the fiercely Darwinian message of this boom city. Then they are behind you, and you get a confused hint of the rest of the place, which looks to a British eye like an endlessly extended suburb. Houston is now the fourth largest city in the ...”

“... that are essential to the bohemian ethos, as, too, is tedium, though of a peculiar sort. ‘Day after uneventful day,’ Quentin Crisp remembered, writing about Soho in the late 1920s, ‘night after loveless night, we sat in this café buying each other cups of tea, combing each other’s hair and trying on each ...”

“... and going into the subject a certain amount. Some in the press had shown they were ready to do so: Douglas Warth, in the Sunday Pictorial, warned that ‘the natural British tendency to pass over anything unpleasant in scornful silence’ was providing cover for an ‘unnatural sex vice which is getting a dangerous grip in this country … The silence, I ...”