“... gibe of the time that Freud was the sort of mind-doctor who would prove that you had been in love with your rocking-horse. Perhaps Welles intended such a joke. I could believe almost anything rather than what Welles advised his biographer was the real joke. He told her something, when and in what terms her otherwise detailed notes of sources do not ...”

“... prime minister should get to know his secret service chiefs. Churchill and Margaret Thatcher did, Harold Wilson confessed he scarcely knew them by sight. Churchill was one of the rare politicians who understood the value of intelligence. He quoted intercepts to the Chiefs of Staff and got them in the end to organise the Joint Intelligence Committee on proper ...”

“... of her husband and ignoring his friend, are a source of scandal in the Party.’ Lee was in love with Wise but she didn’t want to marry him – even had it been possible – and didn’t even promise to be faithful to him. ‘So often when I want you most you are simply not to be found,’ she wrote to him. The difficulty with me is that men reach ...”

“... Taussig and Marshall Sahlins), political science (Archie Singham) and African American studies (Harold Cruse). Robinson’s wife and intellectual partner, Elizabeth, began graduate studies in anthropology there, while Robinson joined the politics department, teaching on the new Black Studies programme, where the visiting speakers included Sylvia ...”

“... Tennessee Williams. ‘In Osborne’s values,’ Hare said in his memorial lecture, ‘you find a love of emotion, of high, true, uncensored feeling.’ For Hare, ‘resentment of Look Back in Anger, and recent attempts to rewrite its place in history, are, finally, resentment of vitality. One way or another, the bald can’t wait for Samson to get a ...”

“... him hard to read. ‘You keep your cards close up against your belly,’ his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, complained. ‘You never put them on the table.’ Roosevelt played off one adviser against another as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told Henry Morgenthau, his treasury secretary and a close ...”

“... Trail, but his favourite novel was the now mostly forgotten Lorna Doone, about a farm boy in love with a girl related to the man who murdered his father. Reading was half of Joe’s life. The other half was the natural world beyond his dooryard. Once his parents trusted him to keep shy of snakes and alligators, he was left free to poke about alone among ...”

“... to the age when prime ministers had the leisure to read poetry (Disraeli and Gladstone), write love letters (Asquith) or take morning drinks and afternoon naps (Churchill). I imagine there are lawyers, doctors, accountants, even writers, who feel the same sense of nostalgia for a rhythm of life that’s never coming back. Though he clearly regrets how ...”

“... experiments in living and not absolute values. For Freud, the goal is recovering the capacity to love and work, or, rather more grimly, to turn hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. For Lacan it is ‘not giving ground relative to one’s desire’; for Klein it is reaching the Depressive Position; for Winnicott it is about enabling the patient to ...”

“... three years before Jackson Pollock’s Mural and seven years before his drip paintings.In 1952, Harold Rosenberg, distinguishing the New York Abstract Expressionists from other abstract artists, wrote that ‘at a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which ...”

“... course. Ruth has Amis well sussed besides. ‘He wanted,’ she says, ‘to turn Larkin into a “love ’em and lose ’em type”,’ and for a moment we see these two leading lights of literature as what they once were, the Likely Lads, Larkin as Bob, Amis as Terry and Ruth at this juncture the terrible Thelma.Looking back on it now Ruth says: ‘I was his ...”

“... Michael Heseltine, and Mr Brown too. 20 January. Note how much pleasure I get from anemones. I love their Victorian colours, their green ruffs and how, furry as chestnuts, the blooms gradually open and in so doing turn and arrange themselves in the vase, still retaining their beauty even when almost dead, at every stage of their life delightful. I used to ...”

“... to be sure, was self-inflicted: while a few of his fellow Etonians (Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton) were bursting precociously into print, Orwell chose to slave away in Parisian kitchens even when he was coughing up blood, sleep in dosshouses while cadging the odd ten shillings off his bemused parents, put in a spot of portering at ...”

“... school education while knowing her party will do nothing to alleviate it.24 January. ‘Well, love, the call’s going on’ is what my mother used to say in the early 1960s when I phoned from London, meaning that telephoning to them was still a luxury. On the rare occasions when I was at home and wanted to make a private call it had to be on the shop ...”

“... poems, and one’s self, will just be better or worse instances of familiar types. This is what Harold Bloom calls ‘the strong poet’s anxiety of influence’, his or her ‘horror of finding oneself to be only a copy or a replica’. On this reading of Larkin’s poem, what would it be to have succeeded in tracing home the ‘blind impress’ which all ...”