“... who was then 73, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst once described by the New York Times as ‘John Wayne in a blue suit’. He taught at Columbia and had co-authored a book about the usefulness of the interview in clinical situations. Didion was 66. She wasn’t seeing MacKinnon under duress: her daughter, Quintana, who was an alcoholic, had told her own ...”

“... bladder I find myself having to pee more often, which, when I’m out in the country in a car, is no problem, though like a dog or a creature marking its territory, I do find myself often choosing the same spot. One regular place of worship is a lane on the outskirts of Leeds between Arthington and Harewood. It’s a nice location and of some historic ...”

“... evocative account was written by someone who was not there, was indeed so far ‘out of it’ that no one in the family had dreamed of inviting him. And if, given the absence of footnotes for the passages in question, one were to ask how he came by such detail, one possible answer is that he made it up. As this episode may suggest, the author of this book is ...”

“... schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence ...”

“... of the inauguration of an academic programme in October 1895, in two rented rooms in what is now John Adam Street. Nor is it unprecedented for someone who has run the School to write about it. One can point to the austere history of the LSE’s foundation by Sir Sydney Caine, or to what Dahrendorf calls ‘William Beveridge’s intriguing London School of ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at his ...”

“... things about them, especially for visitors tramping around in the dark trying to find, say, No. 25, block 5, entrance 3, without benefit of footpaths, adequate lighting or a clear numbering system. The problem is that, on the one hand, Hatherley is bound to reject ‘the architectural views of Charles Windsor’ (elsewhere, he gives him his title) that ...”

“... case would never have had the nerve to speak to him. I’d first heard his voice in Exeter College hall some time in 1955. The lower end of the scholars’ table where I was sitting was only a yard or two from high table where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like ...”

“... was the lineal descendant of the Labour rebellion. But dissent in the Conservative Party presented no comparable threat. Since Harold Macmillan’s first application for membership in 1962, it had been settled policy to join the European Community. Now, with a decisive House of Commons vote behind it, the British would be ‘good Europeans’, at least as long ...”

“... him as laughably small-scale: ‘just kindergarten stuff’. In Vidal’s native land there is no need of cash-for-questions. The deal there is cash-for-answers. And the answers are delivered in the form of ‘special legislation’. In America sleaze makes a difference. At first, the spectacle of Vidal pulling his New World patrician stunt was pretty ...”

“... any of them represent tragedy in the classic or Shakespearean sense.’ (This is because they have no feeling that the sadness and loss are without a purpose.) The tellers of bomb stories, however, were not artists and not historians. They can’t be held guilty of ‘emplotment’, meaning that their interpretation affects their selection of facts, and I get ...”

“... invariably demeaned by its occupant. Sixty years ago this month, the then Tory Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, chose to announce a new Public Order Bill in the course of an offensive and thoroughly partisan speech at Cleckheaton Town Hall which just happened to be delivered in the same week in which Labour’s annual ...”

“... to the Kennedys or the Daleys in Chicago. The ETU resistance (it was hardly less) had received no succour from the mainstream of the Trade Union movement, whose passivity when confronted with the infamous conduct of Foulkes, Haxell, Fraser and the rest of the Communist conspiracy devastatingly proclaimed a comfortable, institutional mediocrity of ...”

“... but simply that the past, as I had perceived it, was defined by an absence of colour. No one who grew up in the age of black and white photography and film could have suffered under the same illusion. But nor, until relatively recently, would a child’s perception of the past have been necessarily, or primarily, defined by images: things, like ...”

“... see the hanging, drawing and quartering of Thomas Harrison, the first of the regicides, and he was no more pleased with the congestion then. Citizens in Restoration London were obsessed with the nearness of death, also with shaving minutes off everything you could shave minutes off, including crossing the road. Was that the beginning of urban hurriedness, a ...”