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“... for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded for the construction of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was ...”

“... still in force.’ Less direct approaches are likely to be more rewarding. An old episode of Hill Street Blues, for instance, dealt with disability issues in a glancing way. A police car on urgent duty was parked so that it happened to block one of the cutaway sections which since the Seventies have been required on American pavements, and an activist in ...”

“... that group into crisis and most of Hobsbawm’s fellow-travellers (E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill) left the party then or soon afterwards. Hobsbawm did not, concluding that the Soviet invasion, however agonising, was a necessary step in light of the danger of counter-revolution: ‘If we had been in the position of the Soviet government, we should have ...”

“... inside J.C. Penney’s or Costco or Safeway, they’ve looked hardly less exotic than poor Michael Dukakis did on board his ill-advised tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real ...”

“... fumbling languor that lives to this day at the heart of Old Boston. John Kerry’s house on Beacon Hill has guards outside it for the duration of the Convention, but he hardly needs them: he has old guards which stand to attention in his DNA. Kerry once said his childhood had been a life of summers, but with ‘no permanence . . . no roots’; it might also be ...”

“... mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the street, and the woman made an offer well above the market rate. ‘Frederick had just ...”

“... just a master of the political dark arts, he claimed he modelled himself on a Tory predecessor, Michael Heseltine, who had pledged to ‘intervene before breakfast, lunch and dinner’ on the side of British industry. But Mandelson never had a chance to put the case. A few weeks after EDF made its move, he was on the brink of tears, listening to Tony Blair ...”

“... started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather pudgy face. The Farouk ...”

“... you will not be astonished to learn, was ‘grey’ in the opinion of the Bundys.)Now, I know that Michael Ignatieff was aware of the existence of the above correspondence at least a year ago. And I also urged Bird to send it to him. But the Vietnam drama takes up less than a page of his biography, and mentions Berlin’s real positions not at all. We are ...”

“... a malignant chain reaction. By 14 July, transport was moving, the Number 30 bus trundled up the hill from King’s Cross as I walked down, once again, to the station. There were more pedestrians, certainly, more rucksacks, but bus passengers were as stoic, preoccupied, chemically adapted as ever. They looked forward, impatiently, to the forthcoming Harry ...”

“... younger authors, among them Frederick Exley (A Fan’s Notes), Philip Caputo (A Rumour of War) and Michael Mewshaw (Walking Slow), he is the encouraging old pro, spreading the largesse. He recognised and recommended Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), ‘an all-around swell cat’. The literary shoptalk in these letters is free of jargon and brimming with ...”

“... declare on the opening page of his book Strategic Camouflage (1920), ‘“The Other Side of the Hill” no longer exists.’ A photograph taken from 12,000 or 14,000 feet would reveal everything to the trained eye (‘even a track made by the passing of a few men over a field’). Under these circumstances, ‘art alone could screen men and intentions where ...”

“... greatest comedy and one of the greatest comedies in English’. More recently, Howard Erskine-Hill, pursuing a political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of the ...”

“... in 2004), set in the 1980s, the protagonist, Nick, was invited to stay in a large house in Notting Hill by a Tory MP and his family. He stayed there for years. Nick’s last name, Guest, almost insists on this status of provisional privilege, the satisfaction and desolation of being included without belonging. Freddie Green, the first-person narrator in the ...”

“... his head – ‘La, Sir! You’re always fancying things.’ One of the book’s recent champions, Michael Neve, finds it a ‘subtle meditation on the philosophical ludicrousness of love’, a ‘picture of driven desire that, with Freudian exactness, ends up without even an obscure object’. All the while Hazlitt continued his punishing schedule of literary ...”