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“... to spare him a confrontation with the truth. ‘If Philip hadn’t been drugged,’ his friend Michael Bowen remembered, ‘he would have been raving. He was that frightened.’Larkin’s letters are full of references to his fear of death, some humorous, some grimly foreboding. In November 1982 he wrote to Motion about a dinner held for Thatcher by the ...”

“... as Eric Heffer I am inclined to suspect Sisson of being almost as narrow-church as Enoch Powell. C.H. Sisson writes of Richard Hooker in a ‘Little-Englander’ way. He says that Hooker was ‘the classic apologist of the Church of England’. (Sisson’s italics.) It is (claims Sisson) ‘not a sect, but the historic heir of the medieval ...”

“... Syria. Washington has made it clear that it intends to deal with both regimes at once. When Colin Powell visited Bashar Assad after the conquest of Baghdad it was to name the price of Baathism’s survival in Syria: ending support for Hizbollah in Lebanon, closing the Damascus offices of Palestinian guerrilla organisations and deporting their leaders. He told ...”

“... Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more pervasive, more part of the new metropolitan air that English authors breathed: they absorbed him as Dostoevsky and the Russian writers had breathed the ...”

“... jobs. What about those ‘illegals’? Are they not, as everyone from Pat Buchanan in the US to Michael Howard in Britain keeps telling us, mere human refuse: a menace to civilised society? On the contrary, they do the dirty work which makes the civilised comfort of Buchanan and Howard possible. Society gets their contribution cheap. In the most ...”

“... its humour less absorbing than before. Even that blend of the banal and the appalling, to which Michael Holroyd rightly drew attention, was not as compulsive as it had been. The past was claiming its own. Disillusion is in a sense completed by this biography: not, I hasten to say, the biographer’s fault, since he has made it as readable as Hamilton’s ...”

“... As the ‘intelligence war’ escalated, it was left to officers from MI6, in particular Michael Oatley, to find a more constructive approach, and he conducted secret back-channel talks with Catholic priests, the Derry businessman Brendan Duddy, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. After Mountbatten’s murder in August 1979 and the killing, hours ...”

“... links between environment and consciousness in this affair. After Mandelson resigned, Lady Carla Powell wailed publicly about the traumatic treatment of her confidant and soul mate. Mandelson had stayed with her while his Notting Hill base was redesigned. Her husband, Sir Charles Powell, was Margaret Thatcher’s foreign ...”

“... the chronology won’t fit. Death comes for the Archbishop, though it is remembered by an Anthony Powell character only as the name of a lethal cocktail, is the title of a frail and delicate masterpiece by Willa Cather, that much underrated writer, which more than fifty years ago delineated the shape that North American civilisation would assume in the mind ...”

“... great British stability, and infused by a changing but always recognisable British identity. When Michael Powell in A Canterbury Tale had shown a hawk rising from a pilgrim’s hand and turning into a Spitfire, it had seemed natural. When English Electric developed the RAF’s new jet interceptor, the Lightning – tested by Roly Beamont – it had ...”

“... An indication of the prevailing climate within MI5 is given by the fact that it was in 1975 that Michael Bettaney (later jailed for trying, unsuccessfully, to sell secrets to the KGB) was recruited. What is usually forgotten in the Pincheresque version of events is that Bettaney was a deeply unstable young man, committed to the extreme Right. Having failed ...”

“... free improvisation and led a Scratch Orchestra of musicians and artists; that his father was Michael Cardew, the potter; that he wrote a polemical tract alleging that Stockhausen ‘serves imperialism’; and that, after spending a decade as a prominent Maoist, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver, in an apparent accident that conspiracy theorists have ...”

“... advantage of being the first in the field. Since he (or rather, his selfless literary executor, Michael Foot) shook off the chains of conventional Cabinet secrecy and got volume one into print, there have been successors. Every minister knew, at the time when all these notebooks and tapes were being compiled round poor old Harold Wilson’s Cabinet ...”

“... with Tom Driberg, the well-known Communist who later became Chairman of the Labour Party and, on Michael Foot’s special plea, a Labour peer. Driberg, an active undergraduate Communist at Oxford, was closely associated in politics with A.J.P. Taylor, who himself travelled in Russia in the 1920s, where he met the Bolshevik leader Kirov. During the ...”

“... as the police were fumbling with handcuffs. It was this spectacle – more than the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, after a violent altercation – that set off the demonstrations which continue in many American cities to protest against the mistreatment and killing of citizens with impunity. The Senate Select Committee report on CIA ...”