“... because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the City Treasurer of Coventry. He was also a veteran of several Nuremberg rallies, a pen-pal of Schacht’s, and had a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece that gave the Nazi salute. Sydney made no ...”

“... that wracked Britain that winter – was portrayed by the government and media as an outrider of man-made climate change. And yet the government response was broadly the same as in 1953: money was rushed into building new flood defences. The best – a cynic would say the only – way for a community to get effective flood defences in Britain is to be badly ...”

“... that Berryman began to write his Dream Songs with a song he later ‘killed’: The jolly old man is a silly old dumb with a mean face, humped, who kills dead. There is a tall who loves only him. She has sworn ‘Blue to you forever, Gray to the little rat, go to bed.’ I fink it’s bads all over.It ends: Henry and Mabel ought to but can’t. Childness ...”

“... creature who will identify an innocent colleague with the mole he is hunting and kill the wrong man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le Carré’s world the dingy agents of the KGB and MI6 are interchangeable. Who can forget A.J.P. Taylor’s jibe that no spy ever told his masters ...”

“... You really cannot tell fully about a thing until the man’s work is all there,’ Auden said in an interview a few months before he died. Thanks to the magnificent efforts of Edward Mendelson, it’s now all here: prose, plays, libretti and, finally, the poems, coming to just over 7500 pages all told. Sizing up these volumes, one might take courage from a line in ‘The Labyrinth’: ‘Assume this maze has got a plan ...”

“... cultivated life and an education’. They would make better photographs, he claimed, because ‘a man who has faith, intelligence and cultivation will show that in his work. Fine photography is literature, and it should be.’ These seemingly opposed and simple approaches were not opposed or simple at all, and together they constitute the basis of his ...”

“... much other than malaria and syphilis (‘and nobody was going to get up in court and say: “That man failed to cure my clap.” ’) Where once the profession’s main therapeutic resource was the bedside manner, and the patient’s principal response gratitude, Bonney argued, people now expected to be cured and would sue if they were not. The argument rang ...”

“... and the offence must be carried out ‘without reasonable excuse or justification’ – a de facto public interest test. To have conspired in the misconduct, a journalist had to know, or be in a position where they should have known, that the official’s actions met all these criteria. Knowing the official was breaking their terms of employment ...”

“... the war, by publishing her in Les Temps modernes and writing a preface for her novel Portrait of a Man Unknown (1948). (The war between antediluvian existentialists and cool modernists had not yet started.) Without the advent of the ‘new novel’ in the 1950s, Sarraute’s career might not have taken off at all. But it did take off, and towards the end of ...”

“... policy shall get loose, not only to our embarrassment, but to yours also.’ Gamlin was a company man and he clearly got the point. ‘In spite of the desire voiced by some of the children who wrote,’ Gamlin replied, ‘I have no intention of using any material by the above author, as I think I mentioned to you after I had first approached her without ...”

“... chairman of the local council, who lives next door to my friend Steve. The chairman is a gaunt man with a heavy moustache that gives him a doleful, hangdog look. He lives in a neat, detached, over-decorated home on a small estate. We go into the living-room. On the occasional table where I set up my tape recorder there are Hummel ornaments and photographs ...”

“... time of year . . . I was being played like a pipe organ, and with all the stops pulled out: Cor de nuit, Hautbois, Voix humaine. The back door was open. I walked in. Nothing had really changed. I felt like one of those characters in a Dutch painting, ‘the old burgher’s son’, returning to the canvas out of which I’d strayed for a time, having lost my ...”

“... Journal of the International Society for Research on Aggression, introduces a review of Frans de Waal’s Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape somewhat apologetically: ‘Although most of this journal is devoted to papers on aggressive behaviour and violence, it is worth remembering that its mandate also includes the study of peaceable alternatives.’ A ‘tragic ...”

“... intellectuals who have made it,’ he wrote. And no one was busting his buttons more than the man at the top of Commentary’s masthead. That evening proved to be a preview of coming attractions, an ethos in embryo. Four years later, Norman Podhoretz published a memoir entitled, yes, Making It, a book that would live in notoriety, which at least beats ...”

“... which more anon). But I have neither the ambition nor the talent to be a serious chronicler de nos jours. The only time in my life I tried to do a Boswell was after an evening on which Elias Canetti had unexpectedly invited himself to supper with us alone. But when, the following morning, I looked through the notes of his conversation which I’d made ...”