“... understand; lest haply they should turn again, and it should be forgiven them’. Kermode drives home that this means he is ‘telling stories in order to ensure that they will miss the point.’ The disciples ask about the parable of the Sower, and Jesus indignantly explains: ‘the sower soweth the word.’ But this is an unusually pointless allegory. Does ...”

“... letters and the world of Society, lunched with Browning and dined with Matthew Arnold, and visited Lord This and Lady That and the Honourable Whatshisname. The Hardy that we have at the end of the volume is a prosperous, middle-aged English Man of Letters, someone who might have written the works of, say, Edmund Gosse, or Walter Besant. But a career is not a ...”

“... Why I went I can’t think – the volume was some piece of unreadable bufferdom extruded by Lord Butler, who as ‘Rab’ had never in his life done anything to live down the Greek Street sobriquet ‘flabby-faced old coward’. He himself was vaguely present, moving about the carpet like a terrible tortoise. A sprinkling of hacks and politicos ...”

“... to know about Nancy, but leaves out her charm, which was ‘such that we all fell easy victims’, Lord Brand wrote when he first met her. It must have been colossal to make her friends put up with some of the qualities in Fox’s inventory, not to speak of her relentless interference in their affairs. Phyllis gets no ‘character’ subsection in the ...”

“... sketched out for the 16-year-old Viscount Althorp, Jones’s pupil and future patron, who became home secretary after his death. The tensions and paradoxes of patronage culture mark Jones’s entire career, nowhere more than in his dealings with Althorp and the Spencer family. The grandson of an Anglesey sheep farmer, Jones was never exactly poor: his father ...”

“... only experience can provide, having completed an excellent education of the more bookish sort at home. They astonish their hosts along the way with Sherlock-Holmes-like inferences from sharply observed particulars strewn in their path; Walpole’s homegrown example for this sort of ‘accidental sagacity’ was ‘of my ...”

“... they can’t be squared, they shall be squashed.’ His squaring was famous: Aitken became Lord Beaverbrook, Northcliffe was sent off on a mission to Washington. Squashing was the fate of, for example, the Daily Chronicle, which became improperly critical and in 1918 was bought over by Lloyd George henchmen. By 1918, as peace returned, the press and ...”

“... part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, “Look, my Lord, it comes.”’ ‘Remember me’ was Boswell’s mandate from the start and the ghost’s injunction took on poignancy when the Life was published in 1791, seven years after Johnson’s death. Within its confines, the great man still lives. Floating down ...”

“... a guess at circa 1910. The fact that our hero only aspires to a half-bottle of claret with his ‘home-made broth, sirloin of beef, apple and raisin tart with cream, and some Stilton cheese’, suggests a Wellsian decorum rather than a Dickensian extravagance. Against this reassuring decor, Susan Hill manages her gradual escalation of uncanny effects. The ...”

“... camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their retinues of ad-men and advisers, was to run a campaign fuelled by fear, a re-run of ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ Fear was a tune which the Prime Minister had practised assiduously over the years: fear of Scargill, fear of ...”

“... is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way. In the pages that follow he is both a mythical hero of the suburbs and a holy fool; he is both a legend in his own dreams and a ridiculous figure, a character whose reality is evoked by the close ...”

“... time until this year when suddenly Of all the history-pitted bits of Italy I found it most like home, a proper cage (Not Pound’s) to hold the aging spirit’s rage. Streets almost empty, traffic ice-cream slow, The silent squares out of de Chirico, All tourists heading for the Leaning Tower (The bars have yet to learn of Happy Hour) And history’s ghosts ...”

“... them had been elected in a by-election in February of that year. He was Sir Keith Joseph, son of a Lord Mayor of London and director of the family construction firm of Bovis. It was the year of Suez and in a very gentle way he was a rebel. He did not think that Nasser should be destroyed because he might be replaced by someone worse, and he felt that any ...”

“... An unsparing account of old-fashioned princely progresses is to be found in The Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920-1922, describing tours with an earlier Prince of Wales (Edward VIII). Some reviewers have sensibly wondered why this schoolboy-style log was disinterred. If it has any lasting value, it must be to the social historian with an eye for ...”

“... Unionist coalition which came into being in the mid-1880s in response to the rise of Parnell’s Home Rule Party. Its early allies at Westminster were the Conservative Party and Liberal opponents of Gladstone; its allies at home were the sectarian Orange Order, and the Protestant landowning, professional and business ...”