“... was ‘always dirty and smelt’. This diary is also a love story: ‘The sun was shining and Alan took my hand.’ Eva Taylor considers her husband ‘cleverer than Macaulay’, whose works he reads to her, along with Gulliver’s Travels and The Diary of a Nobody. What A.J.P. Taylor needs, she says, is an intellectual woman ‘who adores him’. He has found ...”

“... this day, and it is a little strange to see it used in the title of the present book as though he took part in this war on the virtuous side. Yet such is the case. Robert Kidd appeared on the recorded scene in 1689 at the age of about 44, as one of the crew of a buccaneering ship in the West Indies. Buccaneering and piracy were often much the same ...”

“... endear him to the angry young men of the time. The Modernists, in the ascendant after his death, took their revenge. In no sense a Pioneer of Modern Design, Lutyens was pointedly ignored in Pevsner’s teleological tale, An Outline of European Architecture. ‘Our greatest architect since Wren’ was caricatured as ‘the greatest folly-builder England has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the episode occurred. ‘This letter,’ they continued, ‘also records our feelings that it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord ...”

“... be it is also one of the more worrying symptoms of a bizarre and poignant neurological disorder. John suffers from dysphasia – or aphasia as it is also called; and it is one of the many paradoxes of his condition that although he can hear perfectly, he cannot monitor what he is saying, or rather not saying. The buffer which in normal speech-processing ...”

“... from the City whose role appeared to be that of prompting the MI5 officer – for that is what I took the man from ‘the office’ to be – when he hesitated over a real or pretended indiscretion. The conversation was all to do with the extent to which the Russian Intelligence Service had penetrated British life. The MI5 officer quickly dispensed with the ...”

“... a belief that Gorbachev appears still to hold. Yakovlev, however, went further and soon took the view that socialism of anything other than the social democratic type was a distortion of ‘nature’, which he defines as the market. These two sets of views, produced within the system but captive to its own inability to change without being ...”

“... what, when she turned writer, Sarraute was to call a ‘tropism’. The term is one that she took from the natural sciences, and when she adopted it she may have been thinking of Proust, who had recently made such apt and witty use of Maeterlinck’s L’lntelligence des fleurs in describing the first, charmingly camp pas de deux between the Baron de ...”

“... Ceausescu was having built for himself when he was deposed and then killed in December 1989 – I took the train up to the Jiu Valley. It jolted and squealed north to the city of Brasov, then west through the Transylvanian Alps to Petrosani, the central town in the Valley. It was after midnight when we arrived; a late-night kiosk had some bread and ...”

“... the industrial and labour correspondents – itself a cause of bitter comment from a group that took pride in its morning bleariness – to demonstrate, with the help of charts and coloured markers, how the markets were moving inexorably against deep-mined – and relatively expensive – British coal. The pre-MacGregor Board would never have jeopardised ...”

“... a favourite method in the 19th and early 20th centuries. ‘No man,’ according to Byron, ‘ever took a razor in hand who did not at some time think how easily he might sever the silver cord of life.’ The advent of the safety razor inhibited such morbidity. It is unlikely that anyone has ever held a Bic disposable in his hand and contemplated severing the ...”

“... it helped him, professionally or personally, being caught between worlds to quite that extent.He took early retirement in 1979, after working for the same employer for thirty years, and died suddenly in 1983. He was the age I am now. Most of my memories of him are from Hong Kong and that emotional complication is one of the reasons I don’t like going ...”

“... John White is famous for the drawings he made in the late 1580s which record aspects of the North American littoral: its geography, its inhabitants, their dress, customs and dwellings, and the birds, plants and animals found there. Seventy-five of White’s drawings, along with navigational instruments, maps, books and relics of 16th-century exploration are on show in A New World, an exhibition at the British Museum until 17 June ...”

“... mourners were Gypsy harpers and fiddlers, scholars, civic officials and ‘the painter Mr Augustus John’. ‘Hundreds of spectators,’ it was reported, ‘waited for the coming of the mortal remains of Dr John Sampson, the well-known philologist and librarian of Liverpool University.’ As a specialist in Romani he had ...”