“... living room. It’s now in the laundry room of the house that I’ve long shared with my husband, David Coster. (He’s a farm boy turned general surgeon – very handsome, with blond hair and blue eyes – whom I met just a few months after that sabbatical, and he’s also only a few months younger than I am.) And I may well – as either a joke or an only ...”

“... leader. Would he – could he? – perform the countless vital tasks that come naturally to David Cameron or Tony Blair: everything from how to comport yourself at the despatch box to the best way to climb out of a chauffeur-driven car, from how to use an autocue to knowing which pop band to choose on Desert Island Discs. If you don’t know which tie ...”

“... are commonly brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish ...”

“... How long​ do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: ‘It’s worse, much worse, than you think.’ All the news is bad. Marshalling research from across the sprawling field of climate studies, Wallace-Wells paints a picture of disastrous change on an almost incomprehensible scale ...”

“... fingers stained the virulent yellowish green I’ve been sponging on during this last week. As a young man my father smoked quite heavily and his fingers were stained like this by cigarettes – and a nice brown it was, and one which I wouldn’t mind seeing on the wall; if he were alive still and the man he was when I was ten I could take him along to ...”

“... chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably courageous thing to do. Macmillan never forgot it. Profumo then proceeded to enjoy a notably good war, serving first as an air intelligence liaison officer during the Battle of Britain, before seeing action in the battle of ...”

“... Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a teenage racist. He says it was all schoolboy high jinks. Given that this was the late 1970s, it is ...”

“... right-wing. Both authors write of their profound respect for one of their former bosses, George K. Young. Young, who died recently, was deputy head of MI6 until he joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in 1961. One of the very few revelations in George Blake’s book is a memorandum which George ...”

“... the matters described. The record is relatively immune from this difficulty until 1950, when the young Wedgwood Benn was elected in a by-election for Bristol South-East to succeed the ailing Stafford Cripps. Up to this point the story is told in family correspondence, from which a complicated but largely sympathetic figure emerges. As the ‘baby of the ...”

“... address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines’. By the early ...”

“... not only Mary and Karl, but an infant son, who is almost immediately carried off by a stranger. Young Karl leaves Argus almost immediately, but Mary remains. One winter day when she is at school, Mary is involved in a miracle. In a playground accident her face hits the ice covering the ground, and in that ice, at the point of impact, appears the likeness of ...”

“... in between about Britishness, heroism and the purpose of exploration. Now, another ten years on, David Crane has produced a huge new biography, five years in the researching, no document left unexamined, which aims to reassess the achievements and failures of Captain Scott. Crane wants to lose the underlying political motivations of Huntford’s and ...”

“... turned into permanent exile. His first novel, In the Country of Men (2006), dramatises a young boy’s turmoil when both his neighbour and father are arrested in Tripoli by Gaddafi’s secret police. In his second, Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), a son and a glamorous stepmother, with whom the young man is ...”

“... Pauline Kael took against the rainbow at the end of David Lean’s film Doctor Zhivago. It was a ‘disgraceful effect’, she said, ‘a coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris Pasternak’s novel, as Russian as you can get ...”

“... body is much inclined to allow large claims for writers’ special status. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which, as a student, the narrator had felt was talking directly to her, leaves her students cold. They accuse Rilke of ‘excluding them. They say it’s a lie that writing is a religion requiring the devotion of a priest. They say it’s ...”