“... swathed in cloud. Just after noon the clouds briefly cleared. The expedition’s geologist, Noel Odell, looking up from two thousand feet below, saw two tiny figures on the summit ridge, ‘going strong for the top’. ‘Then,’ he related in a famous despatch to the Times, ‘the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once ...”

“... Mitford, ‘vile and spiteful’. But there were always dissenting voices. ‘How sharp an eye,’ Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of the Diaries. ‘What neat malice! How, in their own fashion, well-written and truthful and honest they are!’ A.J.P. Taylor said that Channon’s ‘rank highest among the political diaries of the period: written, as all good diaries ...”

“... In his remarkable Proust among the Stars, the one study of A la recherche equal to its splendours, Malcolm Bowie observed with justice that while Time in this mode is ‘a “big” controlling theme’, calling forth ‘an impressive philosophical diction’, it ‘levitates too obligingly above the restless detail of Proust’s writing’ in ways that can be ...”