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“... His diplomatic contacts seem to be largely Soviet, East European and African: he usually mentions West European political parties, left or right, with scorn: ‘the German social democratic party just wants to join the Adenauer coalition. They have no guts or sense of purpose and are licked before they start.’ Though this is very much a political diary, his ...”

“... Struggling with his maps, the writer is forced into sheer itinerary: They drove directly south-west into Algeria through Guelma, Bou Saada, Ain Sefra, Colomb Béchar near the Moroccan frontier, Tindouf, into Mauritania through Chinguetta, and reached the Atlantic coast at Nouakshott. Then down the coast to St Louis in Senegal. At Dakar they cut sharply ...”

“... The high moral tone adopted by bankers and industrialists infuriated struggling farmers in the West and South, state legislators in the Midwest, unemployed manufacturing workers and the proprietors of small businesses. ‘When J. Pierpont Morgan, the patron of bishops and exalted pillar of the church, is at his devotions does he think of the starving ...”

“... Augustus William Wilke, was banished from the grounds of Hastings Museum to a corner of the West Marina Gardens in St Leonards-on-Sea adequate to its transcendent obscurity. The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by the syphilis of time, played so well, on an anvil of whitewashed cement, alongside a municipal ...”

“... prefigured where the swing to Labour would be greatest, even those constituencies, like Bristol West (William Waldegrave’s seat), where Labour would come from third place to win. Why were we so ready to discount this overwhelming weight of evidence? The obvious answer is 1992 – once bitten twice shy. That is a good reason; but there are, I think, two ...”

“... and G.S. Rousseau on late 18th-century nerves could just as usefully have been a lot shorter. Nigel Smith is fascinating on ‘The uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution’ and Peter Burke’s little sketch of post-Medieval uses of Latin is wide-ranging and excellent. Other chapters suffer from being wide-ranging and bad. Victor Kiernan’s ‘Languages ...”

“... queer. He’d lived first in the London Terrace complex in Chelsea, then down at the bottom of the West Village, on Charlton Street, off Sixth Avenue. Over the years, I’d visit him and we’d get high, go out to dinner, goof around. It was always a thrill for me, a season’s highlight. He knew how to have fun, like a big kid with a fat wallet: a ...”

“... my grandfather, had claim to be Scottish, despite their London upbringing. Their parents were West Coast Scots who settled in England at the beginning of the 20th century. The brothers’ move to British India – Robin to be assistant manager on the tea plantation, Jack to work on the electrification of Madras – was in some ways a flight from bad times ...”

“... from these and their predecessors that the Americans have drawn for the last seven years. In 1997, Nigel Rodley, then the UN special rapporteur on torture, very specifically reaffirmed his condemnation of these methods as torture: Each of these measures on its own may not provoke severe pain or suffering. Together – and they are frequently used in ...”

“... names like Honeyhanger, Honey Hill, Stoatley Rough, Coneybury, Coneyhurst on the Hill. In south-west Surrey there prospered dozens of related associations bound by false memories of delving Adam and spinning Eve, a fervid enthusiasm for looking backwards and Luddism – which comes easy when you have electricity, gas and a motor home to protect the Napier ...”

“... of Wind in the Willows is to be revived for two weeks in August, the revival to be supervised by a Nigel Nicholson. Mole and Ratty as Harold and Vita now (and Violet Trefusis as Mr Toad). 29 July, Ménerbes. Stripping some redcurrants this evening reminds me how when I was writing both Getting On and The Old Country I could never think of something for the ...”

“... I left it out.’ A self-séance. A summoning of dead voices. My appointment with Marks was in a West Brompton flat, a few streets from his old place in Cathcart Road, and well within crawling distance of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a ...”

“... is running down: typewriters break and no one can fix them, mines and smelters lie idle, and out West, in an image experienced as the ultimate horror, a farmer is spotted using a plough. Men of talent, composers, industrialists, financiers, one by one destroy their businesses and disappear. Faceless governments pass progressively more anti-business ...”

“... triumphant speech in the early hours of the morning when the referendum count was nearly complete, Nigel Farage concluded: ‘Let June the 23rd go down in our history as our independence day!’ The phrasing and the cadence told you that he wasn’t referring to India or America’s annual celebration of their freedom from imperial Britain. How could he be? He ...”

“... held their breath and made a wide circuit. Terrible ghosts were trapped in the ground. On the west of the peninsula, now captured by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, was once the Execution Dock. The gallows and iron cage moved here from Wapping, when the sensibilities of that district, much closer to civilisation, were elevated by the mansions of ...”