“... I suppose Ingrams would say – and one of those middle-aged men (A. Powell, K. Amis, Alan Clark) who claimed to find Mrs Thatcher sexually attractive. The book is suffused with that self-conscious political incorrectness that the Spectator made its own in the 1980s and 1990s and a good deal of drinking goes on, not least by Cobb himself, and while the ...”

“... should have anticipated the reaction, which was very strong,’ their mutual friend Blair Clark warned Lowell. ‘She said that … if Caroline came when you were here, she would leave town, taking Harriet with her, perhaps to the Caribbean.’ In the event Blackwood stayed behind, but it was a brief trip and in January 1971 he was back in ...”