“... in St Petersburg. A solid family, despite their later forced exiles and polyglot adventures, and William’s brother Victor, who was to settle down in business in Finland, sounds rather boringly British. William, too, was English in his own way, which may have been one of the things about him that Evelyn Waugh admired. He ...”

“... there was little they could do about it. Having discovered what her most trusted adviser, Charles Powell, called somewhat euphemistically their ‘ploy’, she moved Howe away from the Foreign Office to become leader of the House of Commons, and a few months later Lawson resigned. The ostensible reason was his inability to work with Alan Walters, Thatcher’s ...”

“... that blacks and whites rioted together, and by uniting in the comforting ritual of banning Enoch Powell from the confines of respectable discourse. The banishment of Powell allowed the House the comfort of believing that ‘we are all multiracialists now.’ Yet the real divisions on race reappeared surreptitiously in ...”

“... there were repeated calls for the restriction of immigration, most notoriously from Enoch Powell. The Conservative Party proved more willing to meet these demands than Labour, and consequently became distrusted by ethnic minorities, for whom racism was an everyday experience. In Sobolewska and Ford’s analysis, the liberalism of ethnic minorities was ...”

“... of a row of hives/running up the side of an orchard/in Loughbrickland,/and then I think of Enoch Powell.’ If you notice the way your mind happens to work rather than getting waylaid by why it works as it does, you sacrifice old-fashioned ideas of depth and purpose – which always go together – for new-fashioned ideas of random, arbitrary ends. There is ...”

“... the great (Diaghilev, the Sitwells), one is often keener to learn of the luck his rival and friend William Walton was having. Walton’s history lurks in the shadows of the Lambertian narrative, and his more succulent achievement stimulates the greater curiosity. As for George Lambert’s overall failure, Motion himself supplies the required epitaph: ‘At a ...”

“... Popular Ballads between 1884 and 1898 as part of the new national conversation, though not William Allingham’s earlier anthology of British ballads, a copy of which Housman owned, and in whose margins he hazarded alternative readings, his interest piqued by the vagaries of oral transmission. Housman diverted the traditional ballad to his purposes ...”

“... project, it’s also one that stands on its own feet. An affinity with the fiction of Anthony Powell has been caught, but this is not a novel. It is not a memoir, though it eats the memoirs of others, plankton-fashion. It is a species of history – annals, perhaps. Kynaston’s far from copious political judgments are sensible and considerate, though I ...”

“... both immediate and remote, got clean away. A canny young military lawyer near the scene, Colin Powell by name, founded a lifelong reputation for promise and initiative by arranging to have the papers mixed up at the office of the Judge-Advocate General.I once asked Ron Ridenhour what had led him to risk everything by compiling his own report on the ...”

“... not listen. It would have been natural to turn instead to the director of the CIA, but this was William Casey, a former businessman and Nixon aide who had been controversially appointed by Reagan as the reward for managing his 1980 election campaign. As the intelligence professionals working with the executive saw it, Casey was reckless, uninformed, and ...”

“... Howe, for example, gave no sexual trouble to anyone we know about. Nor indeed did Diana Trilling. William Phillips and William Barrett seem to have been uxorious or monastic by contrast to the friends whose hands they held at moments of crisis. Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb are Philemon and Baucis, not Abelard and ...”

“... of Jesus. He goes in for Morris dancing, you know. I’ve seen him with bells on his legs.’ ‘William Empson, gentlemen. Seldom seen out of pubs.’ ‘There is not a single living man of letters with less moral courage than Thomas Stearns Eliot.’ He was theatrical, with bushy raised eyebrows, a fondness for dramatic pauses and a way of literally ...”

“... the anecdotes I will include here provide some context for the subsequent doings of Lieutenant William Calley and his comrades. Adviser Mike Sutton one day landed in a Huey helicopter in a Delta hamlet where a limp figure was hanging from ropes lashed to a tree – the village chief, disembowelled during the night by Vietcong guerrillas. His wife had been ...”

“... and the Rosslyns’ young daughter was won over by the same method. And on and on it goes. Anthony Powell remembers that when they were both staying with the Longfords ‘John made everybody laugh.’ ‘Betch made me laugh,’ attests Pamela Mitford. ‘Throughout our lives, whenever we met, we always burst out laughing,’ corroborates John ...”

“... of them might have weakened under Derby’s persuasion, but Cranborne, rather like Enoch Powell in the Thorneycroft-Powell-Birch resignations of 1958, implacably drove them on.’ On Gladstone’s prime ministerial management of his cabinet: ‘While it is difficult to believe that he emulated Attlee’s laconicism ...”