“... filled with rows of people sitting quietly 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 ...”

“... in the Spectator and the Guardian performed a socio-political function quite crucial in their day: building a bridge between the landowning and the mercantile interests, and that in the least obvious, most imaginative way – by catering for the wives and daughters of the merchant, on the one hand, and of the landowner, on the other. Addison at any rate ...”

“... instead mildly successful at W.H. Smith and the Times Bookshop. The case was altered only by James Douglas, the editor (also in a crusader’s spirit) of the Sunday Express. Douglas decided, a month later, to feature the book and its photogenic author, in her ‘severe’ smoking-jacket, as evidence of ‘the plague stalking ...”

“... brilliant minds, such as G.W. Nickson, who ran the Wooton philosophical society, Etonians of my day had few inhibitions about being seen to be either clever or good at sport. One of Eton’s great glories was that it was a tolerant place for the gifted, and there was virtually none of the bullying associated with other public schools. Have things ...”

“... Douglas Dunn’s Selected Poems includes the greater part of his published poems, from Terry Street (published in 1969, and reissued with this selection) through four more volumes to the widely acclaimed Elegies (1985). Terry Street and the two following volumes, The Happier Life and Love or Nothing, were well received as plain unvarnished poems of Northern suburbia: and now the inventory of working-class clothes, foods and pastimes has a certain period interest ...”

“... eight hundred years of history gave a 14th earl’ may suggest an unduly deferential image of Alec Douglas-Home – the name to which he was born and to which he reverted between 1963 and 1974, before retiring from politics as Lord Home of the Hirsel. It was under the courtesy title of Lord Dunglass that he first made his mark in politics, carrying Neville ...”

“... There was ‘a world inside the world’, as Lee Harvey Oswald kept saying in Libra. And then one day there wasn’t. The world was just the world, a vast clutter of causes and coincidences. The underworld emptied itself onto the streets, and mere suspicion began to seem naive, a form of reverse faith. Things were what they were, and quite bad enough at ...”

“... could be recognised, improvised or sentimentalised. ‘The walled-up prisoner inoculated himself day after day with the venom of boredom,’ Kauffmann writes of Napoleon, ‘that aching emptiness which searches for meaning but cannot find it.’ In the house at Longwood, every account of his circumstances ends in the same ...”

“... Above all,’ Douglas Stuart writes in the acknowledgments to Shuggie Bain, his first novel, ‘I owe everything to memories of my mother and her struggle.’ The American cover has a black and white photograph of a boy and a woman in bed, their foreheads touching in a maternal embrace. (On the British cover, a boy sits on a post that looks not unlike a cross ...”

“... was getting my hair done in the Home Beauty Parlor I was sitting under a hair-dryer next to Louise Day Hicks, and the first thing she said to me was, “What are you going to wear tomorrow? Long or short?” ’ A serious criticism of the book must be its sloppiness about sources. As a rule the titles of works quoted are given, but the rule is too often ...”

“... every imaginable facility from changing-room and showers to a pantry for drinks and tea-making. Douglas Hurd’s two sons learned to swim at Chequers and so did mine.’ Chequers deserves a whole chapter, there are so many tributes to be paid. To the telephone girls, ‘quite simply the best telephone girls in the world’, who go down to operate the ...”

“... nose’; ironies like Churchill announcing peace in Europe in 1945 just as the boys in the present day fling themselves into a fierce fight. The play enshrines some terrible jokes. One way of looking at Forty Years On is as an elaborate life-support system for the preservation of bad jokes. ‘Sandy will accompany you, disguised as a waiter. That should at ...”

“... the book has belonged to the handsome, wealthy and, in Ned’s recollection, exceptionally witty Douglas Delmarter – famous enough in later years as an exposer of forgeries (Kundera’s ‘so-called Love Diaries’, for example) for his death to be covered in the foreign media – and the newly widowed Iva, ‘a consensus great beauty’, much as Iris was ...”

“... a third volume, bringing the same critical clarity to bear upon the uses of probability in present-day politics. But from what he tells us, that is evidently not on the immediate agenda. The Taming of Chance is not offered as a history, though it has a chronological framework and a narrative to unfold. As a book of philosophy it is evidently part of a ...”

“... all as ‘amateurish’. In Scotland, however, and mainly thanks to the enthusiasm and industry of Douglas Mack, modern editions of two of Hogg’s novels, The Three Perils of Man and The Brownie of Bodsbeck, have been published in the fairly recent past, together with various selections of his poems and of the shorter fictions he contributed to Blackwood’s ...”