“... Her topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left ...”

“... the malicious remarks she makes about friends and houseguests as soon as they are out of earshot (Joseph Alsop, she tells Mahoney, ‘is a fag … There’s no reason for my liking him except that he was very good during the McCarthy period’). Some of this tartufferie is good for a hollow laugh – or even two or three. Bad behaviour on the part of the ...”

“... is right’ marches and the grind of time which reduces every labour myth to dust, Maxwell Joseph acquired the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. The brewery – with its stables, cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment ...”

“... remain almost unimaginable now, things have changed so quickly. As recently as 1970 the essayist Joseph Epstein could write the following in Harper’s magazine: Private acceptance of homosexuality, in my experience, is not to be found, even among the most liberal-minded, sophisticated and liberated people. Homosexuality may be the one subject left in ...”

“... with some interesting annotations. These annotations, I can now reveal, are in the hand of Sir John Puckering, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. This is a new fact, though not a surprising one. Puckering took a particular interest in what we might today call ‘state security’, and together with another high-ranking court official and Privy ...”

“... Gertrude Jekyll lived to see the first waves of the tide of gentility that swept over Surrey until John Betjeman could not look at one of Miss Jekyll’s beloved rhododendrons without thinking of a stockbroker. Less intellectual, in many ways less effective than Morris, she was, nevertheless, in one sense nearer the heart of the issue. In her work as a garden ...”

“... kept under lock and key. So were the statements of the three friends she denounced as terrorists, Joseph Mooney, Brendan Magill and Alexander Rowntree. In long interviews, all three men had convinced the police that they had no connection at all with any terrorist organisation or any bombing. Yet at the trial their Irish names were left dangling in the ...”

“... for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in ...”

“... was time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”

“... found on the right, among economic liberals of the school of Hayek, whose influence, via Sir Keith Joseph and Milton Friedman, has produced the astonishing spectacle of a British Conservative leadership acting more dogmatically and ideologically, and more precipitately, than any Labour government has ever done. Two favourable reviewers of my recent George ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who ...”

“... faith, undermined by deism, had been shored up for some time by the physico-theology of Bishop Joseph Butler, later assisted by the Rev. William Paley’s Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. According to Paley, the infinite presence, wisdom and benevolence of God were attested to by all living things, from the ...”

“... I told one of my Transport House contacts that perhaps the Prime Minister should be warned that Joseph Kagan, the Gannex millionaire (later ennobled by Wilson and now wanted by the police), was behaving in ways which might embarrass or damage him. I heard nothing more about the matter, although I suspected subsequently that if anybody had scored a black ...”

“... to lodge a protest with the school, so sure was she that Joe was better at everything. The key to John Kennedy’s character lay essentially in acute maternal deprivation – and in the contrast between his cold, prudish mother and his overwhelming, earthy father. His mother could not bear to kiss or even touch her children (except to beat them), left them ...”

“... they could. In any case, he argues, Mrs Thatcher’s Wets were less silent than she and Sir Keith Joseph had been in the Heath Cabinet, and far noisier than the prudent men who staffed her later Cabinets. It is an honourable account but it leaves out what I thought at the time (perhaps wrongly) was the Wets’ real weakness: they had no political base in the ...”