“... of this is still fresh in our memories. Indeed, it was only six months after Major’s demise that Anthony Seldon published this substantial book, and looking at it now provokes mixed reactions. First to marvel that even the prodigiously industrious Dr Seldon – a busy headmaster whose name appeared on five dustjackets in the 1996 season – did it so ...”

“... some hotel.’ It takes me a time to realise that she is not talking about her treasured copies of Anthony Burgess but her social security books.12 March. Names of the Albanian Football Team.The Interpreter: Ilir Agolli.The Manager: Shyqri Rrelli.The Goalkeeper: Blendi Nallbani.2 April. Hotel Terminus, Marcel Ophuls’s documentary on Klaus Barbie, includes an ...”

“... of the mid-Sixties. In those days socialism did not feature – even in the rhetoric. True, Anthony Crosland, Benn’s mentor and former tutor, had used the word in the title of a famous book in 1956. By the time this section of diary opens, however, it had gone right out of vogue. In the run-up to its most important postwar election victory, Labour’s ...”

“... the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first novel, Dusty ...”

“... from Disraeli, just as Attlee descended from Campbell-Bannerman, Gaitskell from Gladstone, Mr Heath from Peel. Disraeli was the greatest leader of the opposition in all history. Harold Macmillan never had to play that part, but who can doubt how good he would have been if the task had fallen his way. Mr Macmillan’s career, like that of everyone who gets ...”

“... to get a call from the Tory whips’ office suggesting that he might hint that the rebel MP Sir Anthony Nutting was ‘terribly under the influence of his American mistress’. I am not sure whether this was better or worse than Campbell’s ultimatum to Robin Cook that he must choose between his wife and his mistress. In any event, Clark resigned soon ...”

“... revenge,’ some muttered – and thus sharpened the knives for the successful challenges to Heath in 1975 and to Thatcher in 1990. The presence of a newspaper cutting among Home’s papers at the Hirsel provides an interesting clue to the mystery of his rise to power. In December 1962 Anthony Howard wrote a piece for ...”

“... ends up producing a fable very much in their own image.In​ June 1961, the Mancunian polymath Anthony Burgess and his first wife, Lynne, took a holiday in the USSR. In Cold War Leningrad there were echoes for Burgess of his backstreet Manchester childhood. The music of accents: voices that were exotic yet strangely familiar, a chorus of hard-tongued ...”

“... as if waiting to strike land.On Any Questions on Radio 4 tonight are Roy Hattersley and Edward Heath, Janet Cohen and Jonathon Porritt. Neither Heath nor Hattersley is a particular favourite of mine but because no one on the panel is extreme in their views, discussion is sensible and without point-scoring and one has the ...”

“... behaviour – a move towards independence and rebellion which began in the early 1970s when the Heath Administration had a working majority and which provided the impetus for the select committee reforms of 1979. On his view, expressed once more in Parliament in the 1980s, significant structural and procedural reforms are achievable, but only if the ...”

“... as and when they occur. We saw this at work quite spectacularly in Roger Lewis’s biography of Anthony Burgess, in Geoff Dyer’s nicely solipsistic account of D.H. Lawrence, in Jonathan Coe’s artful enhancement of B.S. Johnson, and we see it here, in a more measured way. Perhaps our present conception of personality requires something more involving ...”

“... clauses from which remain on the statute book. One of the authors of Magna Carta Uncovered, Anthony Arlidge QC, once invoked Magna Carta when pleading a case before his co-author, Mr Justice (later Lord Chief Justice) Judge, though he lost. As I write, lawyers are planning to invoke Magna Carta in a suit against the lord chancellor, Chris ...”

“... relatively short volume is not so much a biography of Crossman – that is to be provided by Anthony Howard – as a portrait of someone he clearly loved. But it is a long way from being the misty-eyed picture of a faultless hero. Black Tam o’the Binns has a reputation to maintain as a man who puts truth and objectivity before mere ...”

“... break his rivals. Did he ever raise the ethics of such a policy on his long walks on Hampstead Heath, when the old man stopped to piddle? As it was, the old Fleet Street almost collapsed under a weight of greed, waste, corruption, Luddism and bloody-mindedness. The Times and Sunday Times deserved Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mirror deserved Maxwell. In ...”

“... It is my habit​ every morning to cycle to Hampstead Heath and to swim in a bathing pond there. My return route takes me up Downshire Hill, a broad street lined with the homes of the very rich. One house always used to puzzle me. It was very poorly maintained and swathed in invasive ivy. Then, one day in 2006, there was something about it in my local newspaper ...”