“... Steven has been seedy.’ Runciman denied, possibly truthfully, that the relationship with Douglas Davidson, a slightly older Magdalene undergraduate, was physical, describing it as a friendship ‘untrammelled by any emotional complication’. From an early age he seems to have regarded intimacy as undesirable and unnecessary. He apparently never had an ...”

“... excuse for Tory austerity, itself an excuse for dismantling the state. And, as Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley argue in their formidably well-evidenced The New Politics of Class, New Labour’s decision to stop talking about the ‘working-class’ marginalised millions of people.2 It isn’t that class ceased to exist, or that people ceased to feel they ...”

“... judicious biography of Nixon or the recollections of Averell Harriman, Richard Holbrooke or Daniel Davidson. Mr Isaacson has added some extra but exiguous detail to the story. By shopping on both sides of the street, and betraying the side he notionally worked for, Kissinger helped the Nixon campaign in its secret effort to destabilise the Paris peace ...”

“... and developmental, which Rose takes in The 21st-Century Brain. I recall a lovely book by James Thurber and E.B. White, Is Sex Necessary?, among other things a spoof on sex manuals. In their day (1929) these handbooks had a lot of drawings of genital organs, with parts labelled, that made no sense at all. Thurber and White proposed these should be ...”

“... high, or especially scandalous or surprising in the circumstances.’ He also bought a Harley-Davidson, became obsessed by the good life depicted in mail-order catalogues, and decamped alone to Massachusetts, ignoring X’s objections, to take up a job in a small college’s English department. More recently, he has started visiting a palm ...”

“... already mustered in Serbia: the missing word here would be ‘henceforth’. Nonetheless Basil Davidson, a liaison officer with Tito’s partisans, felt that E.P. had it right about the drops to Frank and his crew: London wanted the Bulgarian operation to wither. That might have been a tactical decision based on intelligence from the liaison officers ...”

“... in Proust. Sex? A Dance gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human ...”

“... years. Towards the end of his chapter on Cambridge, summer vacations spent in Paris, working with James Klugmann for a front organisation of the Comintern, and the future historian Margot Heinemann are casually mentioned. Of the former, Hobsbawm delphically remarks, ‘What did one know about him? He gave nothing away’; of the latter, he says simply, ‘she ...”