“... to me was to the point: ‘Your aunts and uncles are extremely affectionate people, and they love you and one must never be impolite. Like it or not, we are part of this family, but please never underestimate the levels of stupidity. When I see how stupid all your mother’s five brothers are I feel there must have been some creative design ...”

“... were passed to his friend, the director Mark Rydell, who was so smooth Gucci wore his shoes. (‘I love what you do’ were his first words.) There were more trips, more late-night calls from the producer, more huddles, more oleaginous words, more rewrites. On the basis of the Pollack draft the film had acquired two expensive stars: Alan Arkin and Goldie ...”

“... truth. She told King that hers was ‘an excitable family with a passion for detail and a love of home and hearth that helped to make the smallest expedition beyond home an occasion to recall in minute detail’. As a teenager, she wrote diaries addressed to a Mr Ardenue, the grey-bearded ruler of the Land of Ardenue, the first in a series of ...”

“... together with the small frisson of difference. Publishers, film studios and TV executives love sequels, since they seem to guarantee a ready-made audience. A glance at the New York Times bestseller list at the time of writing shows one sequel at the top of the list (the further adventures of Hannibal the Cannibal in Thomas Harris’s continuation of ...”

“... interfered with his ministers, particularly at the Foreign Office, where he soon replaced Harold Macmillan with the more malleable Selwyn Lloyd. He used to ring them up at weekends or in the middle of the night, often on quite trivial matters. The author suggests this reflected a lack of self-confidence in domestic affairs but strongly denies that it ...”

“... inflicting it on an audience. Hugh and Moggie were suggested by – but not modelled on – Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In 1968 Nicolson’s diaries had just been published with his passionate account of the fight against Appeasement in the Thirties and how, come the war, appeasers like Chips Channon conveniently forgot to eat their words ...”

“... ran into in the 1590s when the dominant literary modes for pursuing advancement shifted from love poetry and pastoral to a mock-rebellion centred on satires, epigrams and the wilfully obscure. (Sir John Hoskyns, for example, features here not only as a pioneer of nonsense but as a quick wit imprisoned in the Tower for seditious quips.) Inspiring ...”

“... Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as some kind of weird patriotism. It’s written into the genre, because the chief frisson of true crime is not suspense ...”

“... to the heritage of Spanish Islam is seldom remarked on. (There isn’t a single reference to it in Harold Bloom’s weak, lazy introduction to Edith Grossman’s translation of 2003.) When he was writing the novel in the early 17th century Spain was racked by an economic crisis whose chief causes included the depopulation of the countryside after the expulsion ...”

“... the shop did her proud. A river of bittersweet hyperbole flowed by, as the BBC declared its love. Westminster sympathisers were heard to say that the warrior queen was the country’s greatest peacetime prime minister, if not the best of all. She was to receive a funeral of the sort that buried the Queen Mother, and had wished for no grander ceremonial ...”

“... is going to make a good book.’ (He was wrong: le Carré wrote a fictionalised version of the love triangle in his only non-thriller, The Naive and Sentimental Lover, published in 1971, which many readers, like the reviewer from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, struggled through, ‘gripped by a wild yearning for secret agents’.) Up to this ...”

“... of his country or to identify him with the so-called third man if indeed there was one,’ Harold Macmillan, then foreign secretary, said at the close. The next day Philby called a press conference, at which he acknowledged knowing Burgess but said he had no idea that he was a communist. ‘The last time I spoke to a communist, knowing that he was a ...”

“... the reasons for peace. When Robert Duvall as Kilgore makes his great speech about napalm (‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’), he concludes by saying the smell is ‘like . . . victory’. But he hesitates before he says the last word, and nods with tight satisfaction when he has, as if he had found a term that wasn’t obvious, and that ...”

“... Shattuck . . . with their romps up and down the glooming critical slopes of the Blooms, Allan and Harold’ – this is a fair sample, unfortunately, of his idea of lively prose. He accepts that post-structuralism, new historicism, queer studies and all the other movements he bundles together as Theory have done some good. They have made us more aware of the ...”

“... hare chases apart from Rain, Steam and Speed. In one of them, a hare runs over the spot where Harold was felled at the Battle of Hastings. In Apollo and Daphne (c.1837), Daphne prevents Apollo from helping a dog pursue a hare, foreshadowing the god’s doomed pursuit of the nymph herself, who chose to be turned into a tree rather than be caught. In a ...”