“... of mine in Grand Street, and was a friend of Edward Said’s, whom I knew when I worked at the London Review.) On the day of the dinner she phoned to say that her cook had broken her arm so the dinner would be in a restaurant called Basta Pasta on 17th Street. I thought that sounded like the kind of place my friend Sam and I would find insufficiently grand ...”

“... from finding refuge in Britain. (Echoes of Balfour’s resistance to the Eastern hordes persist in Jack Straw’s ‘bogus asylum seekers’, Tony Blair’s call for the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to be rewritten, and John Townend’s complaint about the ‘mongrelisation’ of Britain.) Balfour warned Parliament that the Jews ...”

“... crushed to death after stowing away in the wheel arch of a Boeing 747 travelling from Kenya to London . . . 58 Chinese stowaways, 18/6/00, found dead in the back of a refrigerated lorry in Dover’ and so on. There have been 18 deaths as a result of racist attacks; there have been 71 suicides. Athwal lists four people who jumped or fell to their deaths ...”

“... his contributing to it. But this was to reckon without the New York crowd. Whereas in Stratford or London you can generally have a quiet word with a leading Shakespearean simply by turning up at the stage door and asking, it isn’t like that on Broadway, at least not when Denzel Washington is in the cast. Despite having paid only minimal attention to the ...”

“... decades ago, when I came down from a suburban version of MacDiarmid’s pastures to work at the London Review of Books, the editor, Karl Miller, had a powerful sense of what connected literature to the land, and even the urban writers he liked – Kingsley Amis, for instance – were filled with a sense of hinterland, or winterland, of childhood places and ...”

“... time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed). That is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the recent My Week with Marilyn could not but fail somewhere as a film. But the question of what – in the aura that surrounds her – she was ...”

“... white hospital sheets were an approximation, I believed.Actually, the reality of the hospital in London was rather different, though the sheets were white. The near-demented Sister Winniki (identical twin of Big Nurse) always ripped the crisp white sheets off me at too early an hour in the morning, in the name of mental health. ‘Up, up, up, Mees ...”

“... drawings. It had been his 40-page pamphlet on an exhibition of Venetian paintings held in London in 1895, mowing down their grandiose attributions (especially the multiplying Giorgiones) with a critical scythe of glinting perspicacity, which had turned him overnight into the enfant terrible of the art world, the maker or breaker of ...”

“... of the talking, which is how it always used to be when I was a child. It was only when I got to London that the men started talking and the women fell silent. 8 August. A new strategy for not working: empty the fluff not only from the sieve on the dryer door, which is routine, but from the grilles on the machine itself. This involves prising off the plastic ...”

“... Fail returned with a huge majority, Haughey became Minister for Health. Two years later, when Jack Lynch, who led the party after Sean Lemass, retired, Haughey won the party leadership by a narrow margin. Now he had all the power he wanted. One theory, to which Bruce Arnold returns throughout his book and which Brian Lenihan, who was Haughey’s deputy ...”

“... the time, The Franklin Papers, whose plot anticipates The Turner Diaries. Both novels derive from Jack London’s ‘revolutionary’s memoir’, The Iron Heel. National Vanguard Books currently offers in its catalogue an edition of The Iron Heel, impudently described as ‘London’s version of The Turner ...”

“... that doubts and tensions should begin to invade the office. Alison Macleod and her husband Jack felt them as keenly as any. As time went on the turmoil increased. It was not possible to work as hard and doggedly as they did at the Daily Worker without fanaticism creeping in; an element of judicious detachment was sometimes lacking. Fear of losing ...”

“... indeed it is one of the closest likenesses between him, Moll Flanders, Roxana and Colonel Jack that their lives are an almost unceasing exercise in problem-solving. ‘Family hierarchy’ also does not quite hit the nail on the head, for Crusoe’s thoughts tend to run more to political than to family sovereignty. Again, and more important, ‘slow ...”

“... age. A lady named Mrs Caine claimed that he had made improper advances to her. The joke went round London that she was certainly Cain but was he Abel? Nothing came of it, and Disraeli is supposed to have said that, if Palmerston dissolved Parliament on the question, he would sweep the country. Gladstone’s habit of accosting prostitutes in order to convert ...”

“... even if it does carry heavy significance. How many Conservatives would have rallied to the Union Jack in 1940 if Nye Bevan, not Churchill, had been prime minister? And was not the deep objection to the Falklands War among many on the left rooted in the fact that acceptance of the war meant accepting, at least temporarily, the leadership of Mrs ...”