“... to tell him of the ‘intense interest and enjoyment’ his book had occasioned: she was, she said, sure that it would help ‘many slightly muddled, BBC-battered people to see things more clearly’.) The title of Geoffrey Lewis’s biography could have been ‘Quintin Hogg’, ‘Quintin Hailsham’ or just ‘Hailsham’. No one, after all, would dream ...”

“... crown’; ‘Charles, you’ve lost the best thing you ever had. Good luck to Wills and Harry,’ said one poster stuck to the railings of Buckingham Palace. As many people noted, the whole atmosphere was very ‘democratic’: rarely can the railings of our royal palaces have been treated with such disrespect. Posters, cards, letters, even rosaries were ...”

“... known to history as the Whitehall Conference, was invited to rescind the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I in 1290. During the next fortnight five meetings were held, the last of them open to the public, before the convention was adjourned. It did not meet again. Menasseh ben Israel, who from his base in Amsterdam had for eight years been mobilising support ...”

“... the rags stained during her period and showed them to him as a sign of her impure nature and said: ‘This is what you love, young man, and it is not beautiful!’ He was so affected by shame and shock at the ugly display that he had a change of heart and became a better man.Damascius insists that ‘Isidore and Hypatia were very different, not only as ...”

“... with a photograph and things become easier. ‘Do you know what was great?’ Richter said: Finding out that a stupid, ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture. And then the freedom to paint what you felt like. Stags, aircraft, secretaries. Not having to invent anything any more, forgetting everything you meant by painting ...”

“... had a second act after losing the election of 1964, serving as foreign secretary under Edward Heath. These are the lucky ones. A different fate awaited Jim Callaghan, who drifted into a burdensome obscurity after losing the 1979 election and resigning as Labour leader the following year. There is a sad letter from him in the LRB archive, responding ...”

“... House of Commons: Not long after this man came into this country – that was in 1933 – it was said that he was a Communist. The source of that information was the Gestapo. At that time the Gestapo accused everybody of being a Communist. When the matter was looked into there was no support for this whatever. And from that time on there was no support. A ...”

“... Can you always count on a bastard for a fancy prose style? It is hard to imagine the fiction of Edward St Aubyn stripped of the cool silver of its style. I am not accusing St Aubyn of being a bastard; I mean that he writes very well about bastards, and that both their contempt for the world and St Aubyn’s contempt for them find their best expression in a certain kind of intelligent, frozen stylishness ...”

“... clothes are the cause of nudity’ – and glimpses of esoteric romance: ‘the genitalia are said to be the first gods, and religious feeling is derived from the ecstasies of intercourse.’ It is clear, despite the almost palpable presence of Freud in these pages – ‘our great father in Vienna’, as Wittels calls him in his memoirs, ‘the greatest ...”

“... conquered, until 1962, when the Evian Agreements made it into an independent state, Algeria was said to be French. Since 1962, because of French investment there, and government loans, as well as the presence on French soil of large numbers of Algerians, France and Algeria have continued to form a strange but inseparable duality. Lionel Jospin, sending his ...”

“... gardeners – and their role in supporting the social function of the country house. These men are said to have had responsibility for ‘everything from designing elaborate formal parterres to planting collections of orchids and conifers’, as well as the provision of vegetables and fruit for the kitchen, house flowers, posies and buttonholes. Yet the ...”

“... and Other Poems, and ‘other books with similar titles’. Richard (whose names were really Edward Godfrey) thought nothing of these books and seems to have approved of his parents as little as of the names they gave him. Doyle refers us to George Winterbourne’s parents, in Death of a Hero, for the characters of his author’s progenitors, but he also ...”

“... to death some 687 foxes in one session.’ But hunters were also early systematic observers. Edward, second Duke of York, in his Master of the Game noticed what David Macdonald’s research has confirmed: foxes eat worms. As it became a more respectable quarry the fox was pampered: its habitat was protected, its enemy, the farmer with chickens, bought ...”

“... to the United States with Auden in 1939 (at the first squeak of an air-raid warning, Waugh said), has often seemed eclipsed by his two comrades in writing. In the famous picture of ‘US THREE’ on Insel Ruegen taken by Spender (with what he archly referred to as his ‘masturbatory camera designed for narcissists’) in summer 1931, Christopher looks ...”

“... all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war. Four of them ...”