“... the matter in hand, which might be deeply personal or merely a means of setting up a meeting next day (or even on the same day). People would normally write without a thought of subsequent retrieval and collection – letters were simply the main instrument of civilised intercourse. The postal service was cheaper and more ...”

“... My mother taught me to read in the summer of 1945, between VE Day and VJ Day, when I was turning three. Time lay on her hands: my father, a major in the Territorials, was away in Palestine, battling Irgun and the Stern Gang in the latter days of the British Mandate, and wasn’t due to be demobilised from the army until the end of the year; and I was a pushover for her deck of home-made flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap ...”

“... searches – one of Google’s engineers, Matt Cutts, used to organise a ‘Look for Porn Day’ before each new version of its web index was launched – but it did help Google to improve substantially on earlier search engines.Page’s undramatic word ‘recursive’ hid a giant material challenge. You can’t find the incoming links to a website ...”

“... just how distinguished Oxford was. Some at least of his reforms were accepted, although to the day of his death he was bitter that Oxford refused to implement his main proposals. Cambridge was earlier off the mark. In 1961 I got a committee set up to consider what questions should be asked, were Cambridge ever to reform its governance. A year passed. The ...”

“... scepticism towards the English cult of Anglican royalism in poets from Burns through MacDiarmid to Douglas Dunn. Paulin’s anthology further castigates English provincialism with doses of foreign poetry. The most immediately striking feature of the book’s semiotics is its tribute to French republicanism: the cover picture shows the Bastille station on the ...”

“... the Marshall Plan (on specific instructions from the Comintern); the opposition to Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 Senate race against Nixon (because of her support for the Korean War, though in all other respects, according to Nixon, she was ‘pink to her very underwear’). When Khrushchev’s 1956 report to the Twentieth Congress was released to party ...”

“... politics which I hide from the Industry but not the women,’ he writes. Craven Hollywood agent by day, radical agitator by night, and round-the-clock horndog, he can’t understand why he’s catnip to ‘the Ladies’ Auxiliary’, as he calls his conquests. ‘Why me?’ he asks: I don’t have movie star looks, haven’t much money … I’m not ...”

“... down. Nixon’s praise of her is touchingly unauthentic: she never indulged in the present-day custom, which I find nauseating, of hugging and kissing her children or others for whom she had great affection ... Only one of those rather pathetic Freudian psychiatrists would suggest that her love of privacy made her private even from her sons. She could ...”

“... in 1937 Graham Greene was chosen to edit an English imitation of the New Yorker called Night and Day, and it is a percipient comment, in view of the coming success of Horizon and the brief existence of Night and Day, that Cyril Connolly’s talent might have better fitted him to be its editor. The bibliographical ...”

“... might have been dining on infected tissue for years. The logic was there, and nobody on that day seemed prepared to challenge it. We might all be infected, we might all go mad and die. Scientists could say – and they do say it, over and over again – that they cannot demonstrate infectivity in the muscle or red meat of cattle, nor in their milk. But ...”

“... The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had ...”

“... Gladys (‘I hope the experiment will be successful,’ he wrote in his diary on their wedding day). There he was introduced to Andrew Bonar Law, another Scots-Canadian son of the manse with a New Brunswick background, who was a rising star in the Unionist (Conservative) Party. It was the beginning of a strange, enduring relationship: Bonar Law as ...”

“... 15th that the 96-year-old queen had appointed in her 70-year reign.Truss packed a lot into her 44-day premiership: the catastrophic budget, the tanking markets, the ministerial resignations and the unwilting lettuce. But it’s the moment of formal installation that sticks in my memory. Photos by Jane Barlow of the Press Association show a frail but smiling ...”

“... On 3 March​ 2014, the first day in the trial of Oscar Pistorius for the killing of Reeva Steenkamp, Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa made her way across courtroom GD at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria slowly and haltingly. She suffers from severe arthritis and for the duration of the trial she sat on an orthopaedic chair, much smaller than the vast leather seats of the two assessors on either side ...”

“... singer and activist whose rich, deep gospel voice adorns Staple Singers numbers like ‘Uncloudy Day’. They had met in New York in the early 1960s and, in her words, ‘court[ed] awhile’. These pages are alive with mental movement, as poets’ drafts always are, and it occurs to me that these multiple studio takes – all these ...”