“... and more plentiful. ‘O God the bottomless tedium of Dostoevsky ... his Russian salad-ness, his Peter-the-Great-would-have-loved-it-ness, his Catharine-loved-being-whipped-why-shouldn’t-you-ness at all times, his lead-me-to-the-Urals-ness, his Hells-eggs-why-aren’t-you-terrified-ness – he is too interested in the reader to be a good writer.’ There ...”

“... her heart wasn’t in becoming a professional, and she never did. Even her two-part affair with King Farouk (the second instalment encouraged by Connolly) doesn’t put her in the professional category. There were no spectacular pickings. After leaving her father’s best friend Skelton earned her living by modelling for the London couturiers, and eked it ...”

“... just because they are so laughable – the viewpoint of Wodehouse, Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Peter Simple. The term ‘novelty’, which now gets translated as ‘trendy’ or ‘fashionable’, becomes a dirty word. ‘Feeling profound or vehement’ is reserved for those who wish to change society – for Tony Benn, the ‘Race Relations ...”

“... he was early made aware ‘of a Civil War feeling, that Hereford and the Welsh had stood for the King, and that across the Severn to the East of us were others who had taken another side. I was to hear much about this business in my early youth, for its passions still ran high.’ Very few children in Hereford can be aware of such passions some hundred years ...”

“... the word means ‘betray’. Yet of the 44 times paradidomi occurs in connection with Judas, the King James Bible erroneously translates it as ‘betray’ on all but four occasions. So a single mistranslation has done much to perpetuate the idea that Judas was a traitor, made him a scapegoat instead of a participant in the action of ‘saving ...”

“... subject: ‘“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too!”’ We notice that Holt has begun to turn his deep question in an unexpected direction. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing, because there is, and we’d better ...”

“... was still keen to explore the options but the rest of them just didn’t seem that interested. Peter Mandelson was detached (‘Surely the rich have suffered enough,’ he says at one point, when Laws tries to find some common ground on progressive taxation), Harriet Harman was distracted, Ed Balls was truculent. Worst of all was Ed Miliband, portrayed ...”

“... issued daily incitements to listeners to topple every crowned head in the region. The Jordanian King was nearly overthrown and the Saudi monarchy seriously destabilised. In both countries Western aid helped to crush the nationalist revolts. Al-Jazeera has no such ambitions: the men running the channel are only too aware that a crowned head, the eccentric ...”

“... it in his three big notebooks bought for 18/6 at ‘the Press Office in Smith Street’ in St Peter Port); but also ‘of’ in the sense of ‘made into’. It is Ebenezer made into a book. (Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude comes to mind, with its paper-baler who is finally baled up himself.) William Golding put it admirably when he said: ‘To ...”

“... by serving as a tutor to the children of the prince-bishop of Lübeck, among them the future king of Sweden. He continued his own work, compiling lists of burned books (or books whose authors had been burned), which he intended to publish together under the title ‘Vulcan’s Library’.Research into intellectual auxiliaries has thrived in recent ...”

“... included an asterisk against the outsiders’ names with a footnote recording that the king intended to confer on each a peerage for life. The footnote papered over the constitutional cracks that arise when individuals are appointed to government from outside Parliament, since it is one of the clearest and best-established constitutional ...”

“... The Tory donor Christopher Moran, at 259, who only has £620 million, £20 million more than King Charles, is the owner of the Chelsea Cloisters, better known as ‘ten floors of whores’.Whether you’re a steel magnate or a lottery winner, you want to be bigger than the guy next door, and that kind of culture, though not new to Britain, had never ...”

“... Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by taking on the second most powerful man in the ...”

“... become editor of the union newspaper, the Miner, a post which entailed membership of the court of King Arthur at his Sheffield Camelot. Routledge was spurned in 1983; it was a painful experience, which may have something to do with his feelings about Scargill. To read that his association with the miners’ leader was a ‘voyage of disillusionment’, that ...”

“... am will be able to tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a ...”