“... 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 ...”

“... within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just papers any ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... quite suddenly, as I was looking for something else in the back pages of the impeccably learned (read: dry as dust) Review of English Studies for July 1949, there he was: ‘Frank Kermode’. Not, I was interested to note, ‘J.F. Kermode’ or any other variant that signalled the first name he never used. (It was one of the lesser indignities of his time in ...”

“... it to a system of decision-making which is thereby legitimated. Instead it rests on the ability to read the ebbs and flows of mood and opinion so as to anticipate what is coming, find a wave that it is useful to amplify, and capitalise on the temporary force and intensity of numbers. It is a practice of politics analogous (not coincidentally) to high-frequency ...”

“... is a legal system in tatters.One apparently minor but actually serious event flagged up by SB is Peter Hain’s outing, under the shelter of parliamentary privilege, of Philip Green as the beneficiary of a court order giving temporary anonymity in a current case. MPs and peers – and certainly Lord Hain – know that the 1689 Bill of Rights, by barring the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... misfit returns to roots where eccentricity is normal; nightmares of two disturbed little girls peter out; urban loser finds fulfilment in harsh eden; new love arrives on tentative gull’s feet; tide of familial happiness seeps in. But although the narrative formula may be trite (Little House on the Prairie Goes to Newfoundland; The Waltons Put Out to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”