“... a textiles magnate who became the principal shareholder in Imperial Chemicals Industries – was said to be the wealthiest man in Lancashire, but the family was uneasy about its status, and his wife, Maurie, complained that she was snubbed by the local gentry. They were Catholic too, which may have been part of it. Both parents seem to have viewed their ...”

“... British publisher cared to risk it. In the words of one of the best editors of the time, Edward Garnett, it contained ugly words, ugly things, would be considered a little sordid; he did have words of praise for it but thought the whole thing needed to be rewritten.) That was 1916. I am further taken aback to find that I did not get around to it for ...”

“... patched and pieced and retold and revoiced the material. During the Soviet era, as Ugrešić has said, the use of traditional material gave writers freedom because it appeared to conform to the populist and nationalist policies of the state. (Lenin had claimed that folktales could be used as the basis for ‘beautiful studies about the hopes and longings of ...”

“... his cancer diagnosis in March this year. He died on 9 June. ‘On the morning of 4 March,’ he said in a final interview in the Guardian, I thought everything was hunky-dory except I had a sore back and my skin looked a bit funny. By the evening of the fourth I’d been told I had only a few months to live. By that time I’d written 90 per cent of the ...”

“... a more scorching erasure. Discrediting, and if possible disavowing, the prime ministership of Edward Heath was one of the earliest tasks of the Thatcherite project. It was what gave coherence to an otherwise confused and erratic new leadership. The leader knew what she detested long before she knew what she liked, and her own part in the Heathite reign of ...”

“... Western money, if released, would go to propping up the same grandiose industrial projects that Edward Gierek wastefully embarked upon a decade ago. Expensive new technology from the West has been used (and would be used again) as a substitute for reform, not as a vehicle for it. For those Poles happiest to ‘make martial law work’, the old Party ...”

“... in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he complained that Britain was investing in a vision of ...”

“... which enormously commended him to Churchill, whose speechwriter he became in 1946. By 1949 he was said to be one of only three people to whom Churchill ever listened, but Churchill was in his dotage when he returned to power in 1951 – hence the importance of Butler, the great patron. From the first, Maudling showed the typical qualities of the ...”

“... camera? Isherwood for his part was never sure. ‘I have no idea what I’m like totally,’ he said in 1973, by which point he had known himself for 69 years. ‘I mean, I have no sense of myself as a person exactly, just as a lot of reactions to things.’ Mirrors feature strongly in Isherwood. Aged 34, Isherwood anatomised Isherwood with a typically cold ...”

“... He speaks of the Cambridge which educated him as still unchangingly complacent, and he might have said, too, that Cambridge is unchangingly combative, a state of mind only superficially at odds with complacency. Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam saw such prickliness in a Cambridge friend of theirs: It is Tennant’s misfortune that with a soul yearning for ...”

“... the British and their Free French allies. Churchill’s man with de Gaulle was Major General Edward Louis Spears, half-English, half-Irish by birth, French by upbringing and education, a career British cavalryman whose two languages (he had also qualified as an Army Interpreter in German), courage (four times wounded) and temperament had made him a name ...”

“... How bogus was Baldwin? When he said in 1925, ‘I give expression, in some unaccountable way, to what the English people think’, the statement was, as Philip Williamson notes in this ambitious new assessment, ‘in any literal sense … untrue’. Similarly with his claim to be ‘voicing what is in the minds of the dumb millions of this country’, though there the assertion was so framed as to make falsification more difficult ...”

“... miscarriage on him. Many years later, Fortune told me that Mead had eventually rounded on him and said he was such an aggressive man that he should go off to study warfare in another tribe. He obliged, and then one day a runner came with a letter from Mead announcing that she was going off with Bateson. ‘What would you have done?’ he asked me. I shook my ...”

“... Among​ the poems Edward Thomas drafted in 1916, shortly before he was posted to France, was ‘As the team’s head-brass’. The poet, seated in the boughs of a fallen elm, watches a ploughman at work ‘narrowing a yellow square/Of charlock’. He exchanges words with him as he pauses at the turn of each furrow, so that the conversational back and forth maps at intervals onto the changing geometry of the field ...”

“... have been canvassed since Eden’s death. The choice for the ‘authorised’ biography is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly ...”