“... I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is routinely marked down whereas ...”

“... In fact nobody had to rely on ‘rumours’ for that intelligence; they had only to read the Times. The owner of Cliveden, Bill Astor, a former Conservative MP whom Profumo had earlier thought ‘not a very nice man’, was ‘the Lord’ in Wilson’s ‘dingy quadrilateral’. He certainly lacked the abilities and attractiveness of his three ...”

“... and surveillance cameras, as an Arcadian grotto. They have no problem with deferred pleasure. They read the future like a transcendent comic strip. Old Thames is rejuvenated in a Mediterranean blue. There are avenues of potential trees, future forests. Docklands is a garden city, clean, broad-avenued, free of traffic and peopled entirely by vibrant ...”

“... and of the Norreys family who lived there. I leave it open on a chair hoping that Rupert will read it, Rycote Church being one of his favourite places. Also open on another chair is Richard Hoggart’s Promises to Keep, in which among other things he mentions not feeling he belongs to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 ...”

“... was impressed by the much older William Burroughs; a year later he encountered Jack Kerouac. He read Hart Crane, adopting and adapting the passion for rhetoric, but ignoring Crane’s attempt to comprehend the culture of the past in a vision of contemporary America. He ignored also Crane’s metrical strictness, and under the influence of William Carlos ...”

“... fastidious, a Labour Conference was always disconcerting. Speeches from the floor were solemnly read or delivered with mounting hysteria. Clumsy populist sentiments and extravagant doctrinaire claims were equally applauded. Unpopular remarks might be shouted down. But in an age when the great set speech was increasingly rare and platform oratory out of ...”

“... Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of comparable stature. There was one solace: the Independent on Sunday would be run by ...”

“... before joylessly making out his fair copy. It is rather unsettling to this engrained prejudice to read the letters of someone like Kenneth Tynan, whose most dandyish prose is the truest expression of himself, who is never more affecting than when preening his affectations. When his writing doesn’t put on the Ritz, when he strains for a less crafted, overtly ...”

“... her charges, beginning when Lilibet was five and her mother ‘the little Duchess of York’. Read Crawfie and you have to adjust to diminutives. Margaret is still described as a little girl when she’s 17. On the other hand, she’s very helpful on history, explaining about Glamis Castle: ‘Here dwelt Macbeth, who is reputed to be by no means the ...”

“... roll-call of radical Jewish dissent extends from Adorno and Benjamin through Kafka and Lukacs to Peter Weiss and Arnold Zweig. But his argument simplifies a more complex problem. His generalisations about Jewish trouble-makers would apply almost equally well to a Catholic like Heinrich Böll, a Marxist like Brecht or a feminist like Christa ...”

“... pastoral art. We need not doubt that Mr McGregor, had he been blessed with children, would have read them The Tale of Peter Rabbit; and it is not hard to imagine someone still smiling over the enchanting Mrs Tittlemouse as they set a mousetrap. Why should we find it surprising that an art-lover in 1790 or so, who wept at ...”

“... I had regained the lean, demented look of a survivor. On the plane (the second, wobbly one) I had read in a local paper that I was indeed ‘flying in’ that day, so it was no big surprise when I was greeted at the terminal by an eager-eyed young pressman. He grabbed my suitcase with one hand and my elbow with the other and guided me off to the Press ...”

“... might not have mattered so much – even in Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet there are some unbelievers, Peter Walker is an honourable example – but his style must have been insufferable. It is not only wickedly witty – better, perhaps, even than Galbraith. From a background of Eton, Balliol, the Guards and the Spectator it is the least some might expect (one ...”

“... porcelain skirts. Suddenly in the pearly light of dawn in bursts this red, bullying monster. I read biographies backwards, beginning with the death. If that takes my fancy I go through the rest. Childhood seldom interests me at all. Craven. Driving to Giggleswick on the back road, I see a barn owl. It is perched, eponymously, on a barn and at the very tip ...”

“... just because they are so laughable – the viewpoint of Wodehouse, Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Peter Simple. The term ‘novelty’, which now gets translated as ‘trendy’ or ‘fashionable’, becomes a dirty word. ‘Feeling profound or vehement’ is reserved for those who wish to change society – for Tony Benn, the ‘Race Relations ...”