“... the secrets of the Thatcher Government were dragged into the public domain with a haste which some may call unseemly but which a contemporary historian can hardly be expected to deplore. First, in 1992, Lawson produced The View from No. 11. It was a cogent defence of his stewardship, exhibiting his expertise as an old financial journalist (though he celebrated ...”

“... I please him any more? Or am I not a good housewife? Haven’t I borne him a son and a daughter, may God have mercy on her? What’s wrong with me that he should marry on top of me?’ ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, child, and a thousand men would desire you. But these things are in the hands of God. Doesn’t the Koran say: “and you ...”

“... sensitive to colours – sounds and letters arrived in his ear colour-coded – and this may account for the depth of his response to White’s oxymoronic accuracy of observation. Is it fellow-feeling or emulous study which produces an earlier variant on the plausible mismatches of nature’s palette? ‘Brown woolly smoke arched and dipped over the ...”

“... brave, and enlivened’ by an innocent love of mischief. She drily adds: ‘Of his modesty, it may be said that though everyone remarked on his reluctance to talk about himself, it is not recorded that anyone ever failed to get him to do so.’ Rider Haggard, in turn, obviously used Selous as a basis for Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines ...”

“... on the floor of his sickroom. The mess is a visible rejection of any proprietary claims that may be made on his life or his work by housekeepers or critics – versions, he would suppose, of the same thing. ‘There is all sorts of debris scattered about – bits of manuscript, letters, newspapers, books,’ Traubel writes of Whitman’s room early on in ...”

“... a contingency plan’ for Pakistan to react ‘immediately’. Returning to Pakistan on 20 May, she called for a government of national unity. Two days later she was leading marches demanding instant nuclear tests or Sharif’s resignation. The glass bracelets worn by South Asian women symbolise effeminacy and cowardice in this macho culture. Benazir ...”

“... are very few.It​ is all but sure that Sadiq Khan will be re-elected as London’s mayor on 6 May. This will not be an exciting election; the sole uncertainty is whether Khan will win in the first round or the second. Unexciting elections give political strategists sleepless nights. Will voters turn out when the outcome is already assured? Will the ...”

“... diatribe against Brussels, he told Cameron: ‘I think it will be a disaster if we leave. I may even have to relocate some of my businesses to be inside the EU.’ Cameron has some regrets about what happened next: It has been reported that I went on to ask him to sack Paul Dacre. Frankly, I wish I had – and I wish it had happened. I suspect he does ...”

“... confirms the ‘pinched, parsimonious quality’ of British attitudes in Eritrea, though it may have been an oversight, rather than a slight, on the part of an expatriate administrative force who knew they would be posted elsewhere before long. Eritrea, a settler project for the Italians, was for the British merely a brief and tiresome tour of ...”

“... was to overwhelm ‘the fire-extinguishing appliances of the community’, after which ‘the city may be destroyed in toto.’ Lanchester also came up with the idea of deterrence, predicting that, where bombing was concerned, the ‘threat of reprisal’ would always be more effective than ‘pseudo-legal’ prohibition under international law. The Zeppelins ...”

“... 29 May. Everyone I know is obsessed with Roy Keane’s tournament-ending public diatribe against the Ireland manager, Mick McCarthy. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, having meetings about me? You were a crap player, you are a crap manager. The only reason I have any dealings with you is that somehow you are manager of my country and you’re not even Irish, you English cunt ...”

“... and a few of de Acosta’s quite staggeringly awful plays one is tempted to demur. Seductive she may have been – Pola Negri? Isadora? Garbo and Dietrich? – but also dumb, spoiled, a headcase, and in the end oddly tedious. Once she got past one’s defences, Cuban heels a-clicking, she seems rapidly to have palled. I guess that’s the problem with ...”

“... on Modern Poetry (1938) that ‘literary criticism should always be partly biographical.’ This may be theoretically unsound, but it springs from something he knew about his own creativity. Yet his strength was not self-disclosure. Although he never subscribed to the Modernist cult of impersonality, he rejected the idea that poetry is self-expression and ...”

“... Eileen had no axe to grind, which made her a rare bird among the expats in Barcelona and may have accounted for her charm in Charles and Lois’s eyes. For all their zeal, they were a lively, sociable couple. The fourth member of the party on that bucolic outing was George Tioli, an ‘Italian boy . . . quite a civilised and interesting ...”

“... last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I cannot construe it.’ Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry, when I read it as a teenager, left me even more baffled since I had ...”