“... that the recollections of those involved in that crisis bore no relation to what they had actually said or done at the time. But Mr Selden seems to have avoided most of the pitfalls of oral history. His book is a work of prodigious industry and will remain of great value to students of the period even when all the documents have appeared. In particular, his ...”

“... sinuses). A speech-writer who at times had to flee the suffocating heat of the President’s study said Roosevelt seemed to enjoy sweating and wiping his wet brow. Nixon loved air-conditioning. In summer he would turn the thermostat down as low as it would go, so he could toast himself by a blazing log fire in the synthetic chill. Extreme as Nixon’s virtuoso ...”

“... happened to the 1930s poets, who had much to say about the condition of England, though it is said, with what accuracy I don’t know, that the four elements of the MacSpaunday group – MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis – were only once in the same room together; and there can have been but few occasions when the whole company of Angry Young Men ...”

“... medium for these continual transactions of inner and outer was her vital irony. When Jane Austen said that she depended on her readers’ ingenuity, she meant something not far from Shakespeare’s ‘Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.’ Virginia Woolf meant kindly when she wished that her predecessor as female artist had lived longer and seen ...”

“... Barlow’s plane. Barlow recognised the way John affected people. A college friend of John’s said: ‘I have never seen anyone get reactions the way he did – not the biggest rock star, not the biggest movie star.’ Barlow said of those who flocked to glimpse him: ‘You could see them just shedding IQ points as they ...”

“... Reeve wryly remarked 17 years ago) only under ideal conditions unlikely ever to be fulfilled. That said, Reeve’s new text, a collation of 11 of the most important manuscripts, is probably the best we’ve had since Geoffrey put his pen down, and it makes much previous scholarship redundant. Michael Faletra’s student translation, for instance, useful and ...”

“... faulty. I recall an almost unbelievable evening’s talk in the mid-Seventies with the late Sir Edward Youde when he was Ambassador in Beijing, in the course of which he seemed to be trying to persuade me that Deng was really a closet liberal in the broadest sense of that word. I thought for an hour or so this was just a diplomat’s game, to test my ...”

“... primrose that forsaken dies’) which Frieda found touching and ‘lovable’, while even Lawrence said ‘it wasn’t bad’. This ‘faded photograph’, as Frieda also called it, which was never published and which Jessie later destroyed, made Frieda intuit even more forcibly the ‘amazing brutality’ of Lawrence’s own novel, then still at the foetal ...”

“... deplores ‘Mood’s technical shortcomings and his inability to profit from the kindly advice of Edward Garnett (affectionately recalled in another piece), but finally puts its unfinishableness down to the death of the girl who had inspired it. There’s certainly something uneasy about its tone from the start: ‘Constance was utterly charming. This book is ...”

“... for a seductress. Two of her skins were the gifts of Imperial statesmen who perhaps should have said it with flowers. ‘Preposterous’ is the word one tries not to apply to Elinor Glyn. Red-haired, green-eyed, intense, snobbish, spendthrift, a devilish fine woman in a tableau vivant, the tease of kings and proconsuls, an unstoppable redecorator, a ...”

“... meeting he looked old and ungainly, but his power & eloquence as a speaker were homeric. But I said at the time that but for his speaking he was in appearance like a cross between a fiend and a tallow chandler. Rossetti, whose friendship is the one most rewardingly described, is also best shown at his worst, or most exasperating. He stayed with the Browns ...”

“... to join the Royal Navy (his mother intervened), and he named the family plantation after Admiral Edward Vernon, the hero of Porto Bello. But Washington had had long experience of that combination of arrogance and condescension which defined British policy towards the mainland colonies in the two decades before the Declaration of Independence. When the ...”

“... your mouth, you don’t know where they’ve been.’ Mostly the tone has the dear grouchiness of Edward FitzGerald, another master of lugubrious comedy and of critical aperçus that weigh more than other men’s tomes. Like Larkin a chastening defender of poets against their own incipient inauthenticities, FitzGerald used to groan to good effect. Tennyson ...”

“... in the last fortieth of a second. ‘We are surrounded by people,’ Brower is supposed to have said, ‘who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal but they are stark, raving mad.’ Brower was a formidable operator and his congregation already knew the theology: they just ...”

“... of meeting him again. He owed thousands of dollars to dozens of people in several counties. He was said to have carried a KKK card and was widely known as a vocal racist. At his last job before being assigned to the drug task-force that conducted the Tulia busts, Coleman was caught stealing gasoline: he was actually arrested for this while working undercover ...”