“... have only arrived at page 3 (large print and two photographs of the young Diana on page 2) when we read: During the day Patrick went to a crèche, at night he was left alone. Sometimes after leaving the coffee bar where I worked I went out dancing. Then Patrick got measles and I had to stop work. The money ran out and I sent Patrick, now two, to live with my ...”

“... even Neville Chamberlain might have blushed. We learn this not from Blair’s memoirs, but from Peter Mandelson’s, which provide a much more complete account of the Blair/Brown relationship (they are also much easier to read, since Mandelson has no problem telling his story in chronological order).* Mandelson reveals ...”

“... Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, allowed his head of information, Collette Bowe, to read out to the Press Association a letter from the Solicitor-General to the selfsame Secretary of State for Defence (Michael Heseltine). Neither the Solicitor-General nor Heseltine knew of the leak. The letter, like the document about the Cruise missiles ...”

“... and trade associations while he was Minister of Reconstruction. The real Addison diary can only be read in the Bodleian, and the real story of the invention and re-invention of a politician obtained only by comparing it with the published version. In this context, Benn’s published diaries are unusually candid and useful because his methods are less ...”

“... in front of computer screens. The highlight of the day is ‘conference’, where the selected few read out lists to each other and then have more meetings about how they can attract more adverts for private health insurance. I imagine the average call centre is more sexy and scandalous but we hacks like to think of ourselves as living slightly on the ...”

“... Studies at Birmingham University as a model for the future, though prospective applicants who read Michael Green’s vulnerable and tedious account of the Centre’s procedures are likely to think again. One contributor – the hapless Easthope – prefers oral poetry to ‘official written poetry, high cultural poetry’, another wants critical ...”

“... the merit, from Le Carré’s point of view, of being pretty well impossible to follow unless you read the book). Smiley’s People is a sequel to Tinker Tailor, and it stars Alec Guinness as Smiley, supported by a number of other characters you will now be able to put a television face to. So all that couldn’t be better and probably was set up (not ...”

“... by V.A. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker (Crime and the Law); to the implications of the work of Peter Laslett; and above all to the burgeoning number of studies of riot. Whether or not we subscribe to notions of the moral economy of rioters, one cannot but be struck by the self-discipline both of the rioters and of their victims. It would he hard to add to ...”

“... there should run such a noticeable vein of anxiety. In Roger Lewis’s extraordinary biography of Peter Sellers, for instance, proper celebration of comic genius goes hand in hand with character assassination. Every version of Tony Hancock’s life zooms in on his alcoholism and depression. David Bellos does not, in the case of Jacques Tati, have a ruthless ...”

“... few months after his death, is a cautionary tale. Belloc might have called it ‘Ganna Mevis, who read too much and ruined her marriage’. The fifth of the six daughters of haute-bourgeois Viennese parents – an academic and his wife – Ganna is rarely without a book. She takes Nietzsche on picnics, reads Hölderlin as she makes pancakes, has a group of ...”

“... in later years sometimes as few as two or three canvases. He struggled to find inspiration: he read widely in philosophy, fiction, poetry in English and French; frequently went to movies and plays; sometimes drove thousands of miles to New England, Mexico or the American West, yet found little to spark new work. Often his wife would provoke him by starting ...”

“... politics doesn’t need to get any higher. But I do feel obliged to keep an eye on the polity: I read the papers, go occasionally to demonstrations and, each morning, as I walk the twenty blocks from my apartment to Columbia to teach my classes, listen to news podcasts. Which means I spent the first week of February listening to podcasts about Jeffrey ...”

“... Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by taking on the second most powerful man in the ...”

“... to curry favour with the Nazis if it meant he could go on performing in Germany. It is alarming to read on practically the last page of this book that Craft was trying to limit access to a proposed Stravinsky archive at UCLA in case evidence there of an anti-semitism ‘so shocking that Goebbels might have written some of it’ led to a boycott of ...”

“... only a few months in office. The best account of Putin’s origins in these three books comes from Peter Truscott. He can be an annoying writer, pausing often to puff out his feathers and crow about how well he knows the great and good, or to gloat over the boring protocol details of state visits at which he was present (Truscott was an MEP, with excellent ...”