“... Larkin who comes out of it as the better performer. Like other figures on the right, Paul Johnson, Michael Wharton and the Spectator crowd, Larkin regarded television as the work of the devil, or at any rate the Labour Party, and was as reluctant to be pictured as any primitive tribesman. Silly, I suppose I think this is, and also self-regarding. Hughes has ...”

“... of unplanned pregnancies – Arthur Seaton, for instance, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Michael Caine’s Alfie – while the women suffer, from their men as much as their abortions. The moral question faced by these men, who until now have been indiscriminately handing round their penises, is whether they will take responsibility for the sex that ...”

“... journalists. I was completely and utterly horrified by what I felt was almost a coup.Hammond flew straight to Washington for the annual IMF conference:When I arrived in Washington, it was to discover that the pound was in free fall … I then had to get out on the TV in Washington, to try to reinterpret the prime minister’s speech for the markets in a way ...”

“... and go, all under the cover of purchasing tobacco.It would​ be easy, but mistaken, to draw a straight line between Clarke’s return to Dublin and the rebellion he helped to lead nine years later, as though what occurred was natural, organic, inevitable and predictable, as though somehow the leadership and the circumstances matched each other, and every ...”

“... in power, made similar accusations against the Jews and many sects they deemed heretical. Michael Constantine Psellos, the Byzantine philosopher, wrote about the Bogomils: In the evening, when the candles are lit, at the time when we celebrate the redemptive Passion of Our Lord, they bring together, in a house appointed for the purpose, young girls ...”

“... his compatriots wallowed in. English writers could rarely stick to the point, he wrote, or look straight at what was in front of them, ‘one eye always swivelling in the direction of fantasy’. What Powell valued was what, choosing his last word with care, Bayley tacitly deprecated as – the polite cough is audible – ‘the Gallic pattern of ...”

“... the same thing – this is my attempt to make an apology, an account that will set the record straight, even though I know this is an impossible task because so much of the record is lost.In​ genealogy, you count about 25 years per generation. If you go back to the early 1800s, that’s nine generations. If you follow both male and female lines ...”

“... talked up withdrawal from Europe long before Ukip appeared on the scene. In the early 1980s, in Michael Foot’s Labour Party, quitting the EEC was policy. When Neil Kinnock took over, Labour embraced Europe, but Mitchell didn’t. His banishment to the back benches as the epitome of old Labour – a socialist, an internationalist and localist rather than ...”

“... that everyone in his battalion had been killed or taken prisoner at the Chemin des Dames. He went straight back to hospital and was finally discharged in October 1918. ‘He was not malingering,’ Humphrey Carpenter writes in his biography. But imagine Tolkien’s guilt, the terror, the shame.After the Armistice, Tolkien worked for a short time on the Oxford ...”

“... schoolday routine. At half-past ten we mustered in the playground by the toilets – no talking, straight lines, wipe your noses please – then set off through the Camp. We passed by Sir John Moore’s pokey little museum, the Folkestone bus stop and the abandoned cinema. We trundled across playing fields, skirted stinging nettles, rounded unknown ...”

“... car. He had spent thirty years in the Sussex Police, and attended the Brighton bombing. He headed straight to the rendezvous point. There were vehicles, people and fire engines everywhere – it was 3 a.m. – and he had to abandon his car at Avondale Park and walk up Walmer Road to Silver Control on Bomore, just under the tower, where the fire commanders ...”