“... Few previous far-right jamborees had boasted such a deep roster of senior British politicians: Michael Gove; Suella Braverman, who proclaimed in her keynote address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the ...”

“... replacing public funding for orphanages. Not long after £200,000 had been spent in convincing the young London male on his way to the wine bar that philistinism is smart and Saatchi and Saatchi are brilliant, the Director was scanning the budget for £300,000 – the sum needed for redundancy payments which would enable her to get rid of some of the senior ...”

“... in the prison. Of Brian Sharp they declared bluntly: ‘We do not believe him.’ Joyce Lynass, a young mother and church worker, had been a police cadet when the men were brought to Queen’s Road Police Station in 1974. She said in her original evidence at the Court of Appeal that she had seen no assault or ill-treatment of the men in prison. She was then ...”

“... she was being literal as well as figurative. A pen was what she wrote with. Dan Jacobson’s and Michael Frayn’s reliance on, respectively, a word processor and a tape recorder needn’t be put down to Post-Modern self-consciousness. Novels naturally like to keep up with the technology on which they rely, but an appeal – however disingenuous – to ...”

“... When he came to write his autobiography, the biographer Michael Holroyd decided to restrict himself to what he calls ‘a good walk-on part’, assigning the leading roles to his family. Avowedly happier with the lives of others than with his own, he remains as close as the circumstance permits to the condition of invisible watcher ...”

“... the police. It’s a mini-masterpiece of modern horror. Cavalcanti, a Brazilian who had joined Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios in 1940, also directed the Christmas party episode; he was best known for his propaganda film Went the Day Well? (1942). In the role of Frere, Michael Redgrave, who in 1942 had been medically ...”

“... suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting. In 1993, Michael Mates left the government after disclosures that he had sent gifts and messages of support to the businessman Asil Nadir. Norman Lamont caused an uproar over his use of public money to evict a tenant from his property. Other lesser Tories, such as Mrs ...”

“... to be regarded as merely one of Auden’s acolytes; two, that he may be seen as precursor to the young poets in Northern Ireland who have been making a stir, if not a Renaissance, since 1968. The first reason is cogent. MacNeice’s work didn’t issue from Auden’s overcoat; it is time to remove it from the simplifications of literary history and ...”

“... a tremendous blow-out, complete with wines and cigars, at the White Lion in Cerrigydrudion. But Michael Sampson, Anthony’s father, who had scattered the ashes nine times over the mountain, looks cold and ill at ease in the faded press photographs. And the Rai’s widow was not present. Soon afterwards an Aunt Mary, never met before, came to visit the ...”

“... the illusions of those who cannot have illusions.Soares says: ‘I was born at a time when most young people had lost their belief in God for much the same reason that their elders had kept theirs – without knowing why.’ They believed in science, Soares says, because they saw it as a form of fate, and ‘like feeble athletes abandoning their ...”

“... find yourself laughing and wanting to go back to see why. The opening story describes a party at a young schoolteacher’s house, the children all dressed up to suggest different States of the Union. Here’s how it begins:   Josephine as the Beehive State wants to know if it’s possible to stub your nose. She’s looking far away, maybe even Utah, and ...”

“... about avoiding the extemporaneous or the casual and few were mindful of posterity from such a young age. Nabokov turned his early life into memoir, arranged all his editions with bibliographic punctilio, wiped out most traces of an original, raw, unformed self. Having made the stuff of family history into myth, he vanished into it. Boyd checks the myth ...”

“... acceptance on sufferance by a people who had first made him sign a contract of good behaviour; a young and sickly and insecure heir; large funds earned outside his duchy as mercenary general; a need to compensate for this tough profession and differentiate himself from men like Malatesta down in Rimini; pride in three or four years of genuinely enjoyed ...”

“... but it is not a happy recourse. In ‘San Ildefonso Nocturne’, he returns to his days as a young rebel, when he and his friends took Dostoevsky and Stendhal as their political inspiration:                         Plaza del Zocalo, vast as the heavens:                                 diaphanous ...”

“... a concert, forgets the rest of his life, and ends up staying there for months himself, alone; the young Muñoz Molina was fascinated and envious. The concept of a ‘winter in Florence’ was an early version of the subsequent Winter in Lisbon, just as the soundman was an avatar of Muñoz Molina, or of James Earl Ray; just as a senior Portuguese immigration ...”