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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... inspirations can crawl to die. Greenwich was stuffed with copies of Anna Pasternak’s Princess in Love. Dealers in the semi-authentic antiquarian bookshops groaned as hustlers with bulging golf carts and child buggies lurched in off the street. ‘We’ve got books. Got ‘em all. Cellar’s full. Sorry.’ Book graveyards are all that remains of ...”

“... of all privacy, said he had discovered, a year after his marriage to Vivien, that he was still in love with Miss Hale, though ‘it may merely have been my reaction against my misery with Vivienne’ – we are told that he gave her name the two extra letters when exasperated – ‘and desire to revert to an earlier situation.’ He attributes the muddle to ...”

“... them stretches the mysterious factory in which knowledge, self-awareness, observation, humour, love of art, are all hard at work at their business of chemical processing. Virginia Woolf wants to pull down the factory, to operate face to face in the open air. Christopher Isherwood, in some ways her most affectionate and enthusiastic disciple, went through ...”

“... speaks in these lines,’ and so on. Spender was not bashful about building on his success. As Harold Nicolson, who also helped his career, observed: ‘He is absolutely determined to become a leading writer.’ Being a ‘leading writer’, not merely a writer, mattered enormously to the young Spender, and this role required more than just writing. The ...”

“... his Church, turn out to be illusions. So instead of becoming an English Montherlant he falls in love with the people he formerly satirised, thinks his country is being regenerated and then betrayed during the war, and is so reactionary a Catholic that an Irishman, Conor Cruise O’Brien, denounces him.Indeed, the whole of his oeuvre has been read as an ...”

“... which includes the weave of the carpet under my bare feet, the moment I discovered my father’s love letters to my mother. I was about ten, mooching around his post-divorce home in Wiltshire, and in a furtive mood. He was gardening and I was peeved that he had not clocked how the hours drag for a bored child. Having nothing better to do, I lowered the drop ...”