“... quality into focus. Was our curiosity about Kafka any different from our curiosity about Joyce or Scott Fitzgerald? It was, but how and why? Answers to these questions began to emerge as more and more of his writings began to appear: his diaries, his letter to his father, the batch of letters to Milena Jesenska and, finally, the enormous volume of letters to ...”

“... in the reporters’ gallery to squeeze whatever fun might be had.The stage was set for what Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, claimed would be ‘a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system’. The staff at Number Ten used, notoriously, to be no larger than the staff of a mayor in a middle-sized German town. Over ...”

“... from the Home Office. 4 October, L’Espiessac. Staying at the house for a couple of days is Scott Harrison, a young man who once worked as a barman for Lynn W. but is now a photographer, working on a hospital ship which plies up and down the coast of West Africa where it berths at various ports and treats the local population, particularly those ...”

“... could have picked someone named Jim Gilmore, but nobody knew who he was. They could have picked Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, who kept repeating that he was the son of a preacher man, had never gone to college, and that he would be tough with Isis because he had stood up to the local teachers’ union when he slashed the education budget in his ...”

“... At first sight, the Hutton Report seemed to provide further evidence of Tony Blair’s intuitive political genius. It was extraordinary to have reaped from the appointment of Lord Hutton a set of findings which transformed a crisis that threatened to be overwhelming into a vindication of every aspect of the government’s conduct, and of the prime minister’s moral probity in particular ...”

“... MacMillan triumphed with that earlier volume, an unexpected bestseller that was praised by Tony Blair as ‘a fascinating piece of history’. Peacemakers is a brilliantly vivid study, which succeeds remarkably in evoking procedures and arguments that might well have seemed exhausting, remote and dry as dust. It also made clear that MacMillan is not ...”

“... form and function, the K2, built out of cast iron to a neoclassical design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and painted a glossy Post Office red all over, came into service in 1927. It was as much emblem as shelter: ventilation came from holes pierced through the top fascia in the shape of a crown. The smaller and more durable K6, also designed by ...”

“... all typical of the pattern in the rest of England’. You can, to quote his near double Tony Hancock, say that again, Mush.Fifty years after Harris and a few years after the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, the battle of the styles was being refought, sort of. The protagonists were united in one bias: they loathed everything ...”

“... once-great names with scant ceremony, interpreting Fielding as too like his own Squire Western, Scott as a mere Border balladeer. Richardson and Dickens, though allowed some merit, were kept out of the limelight. Even within the oeuvres of the favoured George Eliot, James and Conrad, Leavis went in for a further process of separating wheat from chaff, so ...”

“... out of eight quarto volumes of steel engravings), the works of Homer, Milton, Sir Walter Scott, and so on and on and on. Not exactly a treasure trove, but getting so many books at once, with so few titles I would have chosen, moved me suddenly much closer to possession of my fantasy library. Some of the books were hard going – I never got on with ...”

“... Foucault to celebrate the anarchic force of madness while voting Liberal Democrat. You can back Tony Blair and Pierre Bourdieu with equal enthusiasm. In the era of Bolshevism, by contrast, theory had at times to hobble hard to keep abreast of what was happening on the streets. The Petersburg Soviet tore up and rewrote Marxist theories of political ...”

“... anything he had previously recorded, from what any rock star has ever recorded (except perhaps Scott Walker, a Bowie household god from way back): spare, hauntingly personal and as close to simple and emotionally direct as he would ever let himself get. In his age of grand illusion he returned to stately melodies and simple words. ‘Word on a Wing’ is ...”

“... a conviction that social conditions are epiphenomena. Aldiss cites David Lodge’s argument that Tony-Bungay is a better novel than it appears because it insists on spreading its focus from the Ponderevos and Bladesover House to ‘the Condition of England’ itself. In similar style, one could argue that much ‘near-Science Fiction’ gets misread because ...”

“... phone to the William Morris Agency. Standing in his office are Jerry and Joe – Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis – a bass and a saxophone player. Jerry tries to persuade Poliakoff to give them the job – three weeks in Florida with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators – but Poliakoff tells them to beat it, they require female musicians. ‘Look, if William ...”

“... suggests in Dead Lions (2013) that something ‘seems a bit … unlikely’, Lamb replies: ‘Tony Blair’s a peace envoy. Compared to that, everything’s just business as usual.’ In London Rules (2018), talking to an ex-policeman who now does internal security at the Park (one of the ‘Dogs’), Lamb says: ‘“I quite like cops. You know where you ...”