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“... drew a decidedly crisp letter from Lady Mosley, who called it ‘fanciful in the extreme’. As Robert Skidelsky said of the meeting in his Oswald Moslev: ‘The number of future memoir writers and Labour politicians in the audience alone ensured that it would be talked about for years to come.’ There were also a hundred angry busmen present, out for ...”

“... example, about the names and titles of Foreign Office staff, lurching between Lord Cecil and Sir Robert Cecil for Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Esmie instead of Esme Howard, and Sir Cavendish Bentinck for Victor Cavendish-Bentinck. More seriously, Muggeridge is described as ‘an enthusiastic apologist for Stalin’, when in ...”

“... revered Henry James, though perhaps less close than he thought. He was on companionable terms with Wells, Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the ungrateful Hemingway. Throughout his life he strove to keep up with les jeunes; Lawrence called him ‘everybody’s blessed uncle’. He wandered irrationally about the world, living for a time in Germany only because ...”

“... peace lost. It is appropriate that the first letter included in this volume should complain about Robert Buchanan, who had found in Kipling’s work ‘all that is most deplorable, all that is most retrograde and savage, in the restless and uninstructed Hooliganism of the time’. The Boer War provided plenty of scope for hooligans. The notorious celebrations ...”

“... guides, danger and discomfort are paramount. Borneo, written by the imprint’s publisher, Robert Pelton Young, describes itself as one of ‘a series of guides on remote regions for adventurers by adventurers’ and begins with a taste of what may lie in store for the user: I am squatting in a small clearing at night in the Borneo jungle … Sounds of ...”

“... fact. It was a charge perfectly commonplace among all who knew Ford, friends as well as enemies. Robert Lowell, who met him through Allen Tate near the end of his life, quotes the story of Ford, an over-age wartime second lieutenant, playing golf with Lloyd George and giving the PM a piece of his mind on golfing etiquette: had he refrained, he told ...”

“... and if, for example, such typical boys’ reading as Jules Verne and the short stories of H.G. Wells stoked his enthusiasm for a career in science, and I should also like to know how he came to write so well in the straightforward narrative style of Daniel Defoe. But on all these matters we are left to guess: we learn the facts about his life and nothing ...”

“... was ignored, seems to come up like a ghost at the feast throughout this remarkable book. Just as Robert Maxwell was officially declared unfit to run a public company before he was allowed to take over and rob the biggest printing company in the country, so Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland, before he and his company Lonrho were allowed to take over the Observer and ...”

“... effluent. Lord Normanbrook, a predecessor in the Highest Office of State now held by Sir Robert Strongarm, long ago decided this point: ‘any information arising in a government department is officially secret until it is officially released’ (Filchbag Peeper, The Law of Official Leaking, 1978, p. 209). Information was only in the ‘public ...”

“... gave him control of one important oil-producer, and posed a potential threat to another. If Saudi wells had fallen to the advancing Republican Guard 40 per cent of known reserves would have been in the hands of the newly-baptised ‘Beast of Baghdad’. Heikal shows how, in the days after the invasion, Bush manipulated American power in the region to ensure ...”

“... summer, we have the heat index, first proposed in 1979 by the Australian environmental scientist Robert Steadman in an article in the Journal of Applied Meteorology entitled ‘The Assessment of Sultriness Part I: A Temperature-Humidity Index Based on Human Physiology and Clothing Science’. Steadman’s index depends on two variables – temperature and ...”

“... the colours, respectively, of the Orders of the Garter, Bath and Thistle – coveted prizes in Robert Walpole’s repertoire of patronage and sleaze.This didn’t deter the hack who blustered that Swift’s intention ‘could be no other than to ridicule our three most noble Orders’, abuse of which by kings or ministers, he added, could never happen ...”

“... new religious context’. An example of the latter is ‘well-dressing’, the habit of decorating wells and springs with flowers or prayers tied to bushes – offerings that were once directed to water goddesses. But the boundaries of ‘pagan survival’ are blurred. Many things that were cited by folklorists a century ago as vestiges of prehistoric ...”

“... that ‘the etching on page 187 does not portray Professor Jean Martin Charcot, but Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac.’ Technically the most impressive thing in the book is a 90-page letter from Bella describing her European tour and brutal political education, with the accelerating development of her mind signalled by a transition from sing-song ...”

“... book editors made themselves great by ignoring this advice. The best of them – Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Joe Fox, Bennett Cerf – allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused hands. A sad ...”