“... it is the familiar tale with black sauce. The editor’s warning that the letters should be read for entertainment not truth is perhaps superfluous. In this feast of irresponsibility she is ready to puncture with a neat footnote the more wounding nonsenses. She cannot let Mitford get away with imputing ‘intense cowardice’ to Lady Derby for not ...”

“... the fastidious Blunt would surely have quickly buckled. The traffic was not all one way, however. Read The Storm Birds and you realise that for all the holes in its security, the West had coups of its own. At first there were crucial differences. Not until the Sixties did we have real moles within the Soviet apparatus. The prize British and American catches ...”

“... prefer to Gittings’s biography a later one by Michael Millgate, which is said to be (I haven’t read it) more temperate and more boring, at all events more compassionate. A second rearguard action is mounted by Peter J. Casagrande (he’s American, and thanks the General Research Fund of the University of Kansas), who ...”

“... approach here is to cut the Vikings down to size. This is the method associated with the name of Peter Sawyer and it has brought some striking and happily controversial results. An alternative is to exploit hitherto neglected types of evidence, in particular royal charters, in order to look more closely at the work of earlier kings, both in Mercia (after ...”

“... new publications from the States: Mailer, His Life and Times, by (that means ‘transcribed by’) Peter Manso, and Conversations with Capote by (can this be the correct spelling?) Lawrence Grobel.1 Each book goes far, and unpleasantly, beyond mere feet-kissing, and each offers a neat image of the sort of literary-critical milieu in which the Mailers and ...”

“... that Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children was ‘one of the best novels I have ever read’. There is something endearing about that. The impression of a disembodied intelligence remains, as strong in the letters as it must have been in life. Observing that he had ‘the most glittering IQ you ever met’, William Barrett at Partisan Review said ...”

“... of the day. Mr Macmillan knew that prestige and confidence radiate outwards. The public does not read Hansard, as it is supposed to have done – though I do not believe it – in the 19th century, but the man – or woman – who dominates the House does in some mysterious unanalysable way make an imprint on the country. It is not easy to say just how this ...”

“... communal games and simple amusements. But while he was still an undergraduate, he was invited to read a paper to the Moral Sciences Club, an unusual honour, and his subject was ‘Mathematics and Logic’. In 1935, at the age of 22, he was elected to a research fellowship at King’s, also an unusual recognition of his potentialities. His early achievements ...”

“... of powerful loyalty and affection with irritation and ridicule. ‘Let’s make ILEA sillier,’ read a badge, now a collectors’ item, produced by an enterprising bunch of ILEA headteachers during an in-service training course. The reasons for this paradox are many and complex, but there are two major ones. The first relates to an awareness of the sheer ...”

“... Schwarzkopf writes, ‘now that they knew of my fascination with their culture’. General Sir Peter de la Billière, Britain’s commander in the Gulf War, seems even more smitten with Arab ‘culture’2. ‘I liked and respected Arabs and understood their way of life,’ he announces. ‘I came to appreciate the Arabs well, to appreciate their fine ...”

“... by the legend of King Midas. In his impressive study of the origins of the Keynesian revolution, Peter Clarke argued that Keynes was driven throughout the Twenties by policy and politics. He opposed the restoration of the Gold Standard on the grounds that the pound would be overvalued relative to other currencies. He called for public works to compensate for ...”

“... He called gossipy women prattletraps. Bad housewives – majordodos. Unfaithful women – peter-cheetahs. Beer and vodka – sledgehammer, poison and kerosene. And the young generation – pussberries … Once he strung up two cats on a rowan tree, making the nooses with a fishing line. ‘Breeding shebangers,’ he said, ‘catervaulting ...”

“... and judges from across the Commonwealth and a few assorted persons appointed for specific reasons (Peter Riddell, for example, a former Times journalist who acquired membership in 2010 when appointed to the committee examining whether British intelligence services were complicit in the torture of Guantánamo detainees). If we want an official list of the ...”

“... claimed implausibly that his works constituted an artistic whole. Some of Freud’s case histories read like lurid novels, with psychoanalysis assuming the role of the thinking person’s sensationalism. Wittgenstein, who advised one of his disciples to give up philosophy and made a few botched attempts to give it up himself, wanted to write a philosophical ...”

“... he adjusted the measurements upwards. He thought it impregnable but was proved wrong by his tenant Peter the Great, who had come to observe the royal dockyard, and was apparently trundled in and out through the hedge in a wheelbarrow, causing immense damage. I worry about those who pushed him. Read Sylva and Evelyn is before ...”