“... What the animal yearned after, when he gazed forlornly out of his cage, was the freedom to make love to Edwina of his own choice … to break into that domain which, in fact, he could not break out of.’ His speculations slip from human to operatic:Was [Percy] already in the flare-lit, grotto-ornamented, statue-sprinkled garden of Count ...”

“... added, it would be sparkling, unassailable ... It betrayed (betraying means breaking the laws of love). It engaged in pillage. And lastly, it banned itself from the world by homosexuality. It thus established itself as an indestructible solitude. Later, Genet adds: ‘Betrayal, theft and homosexuality are the basic subjects of this book.’ So be it. But ...”

“... was no point, however humble, on which [the Persians] would not consult their English friends.’ (Harold Nicolson was then Counsellor at the British Legation.) ‘They would arrive with little patterns of brocade and velvet; they would ask us to come down and approve the colour of the Throne Room ... They must have red cloth for the palace servants like the ...”

“... wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points ...”

“... scientist who felt that he had never been properly appreciated either in academia – blaming Harold Laski for stopping him getting influential jobs – or in the Labour Party, and for this he felt his wife’s extreme beliefs were partly responsible. When they married, Catlin was teaching at Cornell; hating life as a faculty wife and having found no ...”

“... of old-fashioned guerrilla types’ came ‘swarming down from the mountains to join the fun’. Harold Macmillan admitted that the partisans he saw loosing off rounds and lobbing grenades in Modena ‘caused me more alarm than our opponents’. In France the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), a mix of resistance fighters and former ...”

“... for the camera, where birthday cards were signed ‘best wishes’, where no one ever said ‘I love you’ and where Veda never played with her. Betty ‘remembers much beating of carpets and shovelling of ashes, the salting of mutton to keep it from rotting, the soaking of cucumber slices in dishes of vinegar to make them marginally more ...”

“... School of Economics was evacuated there and Cambridge genius found itself exchanging ideas with Harold Laski (Briggs’s favourite), R.H. Tawney, Denis Brogan, Eileen Power and her Cambridge husband, Michael Postan. Briggs began to read Marx and the new subject of sociology. He was drifting leftwards, remarking (after the Soviet Union had joined the ...”

“... be describing the work of Donald Davidson in philosophy of language, and of Nietzsche, Freud and Harold Bloom in moral psychology, as so many manifestations of a willingness to drop the idea of ‘intrinsic nature’, a willingness to face up to the contingency of the language we use. I shall try to show how a recognition of that contingency leads to a ...”

“... Sedunary are on display at the city’s maritime museum. So is his watch, stopped at 1.50. We’d love to do more, a local official said. Belfast has done more. Stephanie Barczewski quotes an editorial from the Belfast Telegraph of July 1999: ‘In marketing parlance, the story of the liner is a unique selling point for Northern Ireland, and could open the ...”

“... can’t be standing there playing Russian roulette with it can you?’ Reading a letter: A. Love and Kierkegaard? B. (snatching it) Love and Kind Regards. My life does seem right staccato somehow. ‘Get the cattle prod and wake your father.’ My mother. When we say life we often mean risk. 12 ...”

“... black writers probably want to talk about the same sorts of things as white writers – love, loss, desire, power, their relationships with their personal, social and political communities, with their environment, with other texts. Each writer, whether white or black, will draw on a varying experience of these things, ranging from the unique to the ...”

“... gibe of the time that Freud was the sort of mind-doctor who would prove that you had been in love with your rocking-horse. Perhaps Welles intended such a joke. I could believe almost anything rather than what Welles advised his biographer was the real joke. He told her something, when and in what terms her otherwise detailed notes of sources do not ...”

“... prime minister should get to know his secret service chiefs. Churchill and Margaret Thatcher did, Harold Wilson confessed he scarcely knew them by sight. Churchill was one of the rare politicians who understood the value of intelligence. He quoted intercepts to the Chiefs of Staff and got them in the end to organise the Joint Intelligence Committee on proper ...”

“... of her husband and ignoring his friend, are a source of scandal in the Party.’ Lee was in love with Wise but she didn’t want to marry him – even had it been possible – and didn’t even promise to be faithful to him. ‘So often when I want you most you are simply not to be found,’ she wrote to him. The difficulty with me is that men reach ...”