“... Ahab asks. ‘Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in the grave, and we must there to learn it.’ So we can still distinguish the purist Ahab from the compromised Ishmael and, if we wish, prefer the one over the other. For many reasons, we find ourselves (I find myself) at home with ...”

“... minister with a science degree than she was to be the first woman prime minister – and then as a barrister. But it was also a matter of temperament. She liked to badger people, picking away at the same few threads until something started to give. Moore writes of her governing style: ‘She used every remark, every memo, every meeting as an opportunity to ...”

“... and (in a 1993 New Yorker profile) ‘massive and brute irrationality’. Even Patten’s barrister wife, Lavender, calls the Chairman of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank a ‘bloody traitor’ when no one but Dimbleby, equipped with his tape-recorder, is listening. This is not the approach of a history book, but of a morality play, a melodrama or ...”

“... Such an idea would have amused Beckett, but it would have been kept a carefully guarded secret from O’Casey. After Magee had played in Krapp’s Last Tape and MacGowran had played in Endgame, Beckett continued to engage with his new-found Irish voices. Embers, starring both of them, if starring is the word, was first broadcast by the Third ...”

“... but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders named in it, and Julian was inconsistent about that. I never believed he wanted to endanger such people, but he chose to interpret the Guardian’s concern as ‘cowardice’. His ...”

“... about it – so that she could afford to be wise and tolerant.’ (Mrs Butt’s husband was the barrister and politcial activist Isaac Butt, who had defended Gavan Duffy.) William Wilde’s nationalism was milder than his wife’s. In his first book, A Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe and Along the Shores of the Mediterranean, written when he was 24, he spoke ...”