“... the support of the queen,’ Lownie writes, ‘and the endorsement of the former trade secretary Peter Mandelson.’ Andrew was a walking category error, perceiving no difference between business and pleasure, between what was good for the country and what was excellent for him, conducting a campaign of international larceny masquerading as public ...”

“... some beech trees the car turns a corner and I catch sight of a Presbyterian meeting-house – white, shining, Neoclassical, two gold Greek letters above the door. He’s in a rush so I don’t ask to go back and look at this living image of the Ulster Enlightenment. I don’t remember ever having noticed it before. Later that day I’m walking along Ozone ...”

“... The Conservative share in the polls in 1987 on the day Tim Bell rode into Downing Street on a white charger was 44 per cent. One week later, after the expenditure of all the serious money on advertising, their share of votes came out at ... 43 per cent. It wasn’t the media in 1987 which gave Mrs Thatcher her third historic victory. It was her megaphone ...”

“... powerful literary support: Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, Lillian Hellman, Peter Taylor, Elizabeth Hardwick in America; Patrick White in Australia. Books previously declined were now published. There were reprints. There was an interest, and it would grow. It was all good, but it had come too late. In ...”

“... Pounds, fortified with chocolate, were climbing the southwest face of Montségur to the white walls that ride its summit like a stone ship’. And all this, Kenner reminds us, without any real hope of recognition from an increasingly philistine culture. By the late Seventies, when the Author lay dead or dying, the Modernist demi-god had dwindled to ...”

“... different times (and by different factions at the same time) of being a terrorist, a centrist, a White agent, a Nazi agent, a Stalinist agent, a social democrat, a Trotskyist, even (gulp) a Gaullist. After his death in 1947 he was forgotten for decades, being useless to either side in the Cold War – all probity and no PR. Susan Weissman is even more ...”

“... Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set Trakl to music. This new collection is the most substantial so far published in England, and should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is ...”

“... were his antlers). I found the Family Romance of King Arthur, particularly as reincarnated in T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone, in the magic weapon that no one but Harry can wield, and in the gift of talking to animals, that White’s Merlin gives to Arthur (Harry just does snakes). Where Mary Poppins gave the children a ...”

“... must have been Lola Montez.’ Admirers mentioned her air of refinement, her tapered fingers and white hands, her duchessy way of carrying herself. The Morning Post praised her ‘almost faultless’ foot and ankle. Some people spoke adoringly of her ‘mice teeth’, an attribute whose charms have not survived. Some of Lola’s other features were more ...”

“... time.’ When she was permitted her first prison visit in 1781, he was distraught at the revealing white dress and meticulously curled hair that she wore to give him pleasure. He became horribly jealous, and was convinced that as part of a plot by her mother, she was having an intrigue with a Provençal manservant. At other times his messages resembled those ...”

“... many writers who were drawn to use the story in one way or another, among them Trollope, Patrick White, Robin Maugham and Julian Symons, just as Dumas, and Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have ...”

“... as first minister. The independence movement has splintered; the party is mired in scandal. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the SNP’s former chief executive, has been charged with embezzlement, while Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader, Humza Yousaf, had to resign after ill-advisedly cancelling the party’s co-operation agreement with ...”

“... knowing even the most elementary facts about the intelligence services their taxes pay for. The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither ...”

“... timid. They resemble nothing so much as nervous Victorian dabblings with Mr Sludge the medium. A white-coated psychologist was in attendance. Huxley’s main contention is that ‘religion and alcohol do not and cannot mix.’ Mescalin is ‘much more compatible’. Thousands of eager ‘experimenters’ subsequently took their trip through the magic ...”

“... playing a kind of burlesque version of themselves. These are men like the braggadocio Peter Shakerly; the railer Charles Chester, who was the model for Carlo Buffone in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious ...”