“... Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university ...”

“... Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life ...”

“... with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... her diagnosis to keep his attention, her act bolstered by the case histories of schizophrenics she read in the public library (‘It’s masturbation,’ she told him, ‘worry over masturbation’). She wrote her notion of schizophrenia into the stories she let Money read, and which he showed to a publisher. Then, as enough ...”

“... it aloud it would be both quicker to do and the result smoother and more satisfying. But I sight-read it as often as not which, since it’s generally something I’ve written, doesn’t much matter and I generally get away with it. Still, I always think my style, such as it is, is a compound of all my deficiencies, but maybe that’s what style is ...”

“... after his childhood that he kept with anything like childhood thoroughness; a number of others peter out like abandoned resolutions or with a characteristic Forsterian admission that he knew too much about a place in advance to be able to experience it. In Italy in 1901, ‘I have got it up so well that nothing comes as a surprise’; on a first Greek ...”

“... brief statement of its current force, and a way of holding the whole issue before our minds, in Peter de Bolla’s book Art Matters.2 De Bolla is looking at a Barnett Newman painting (Vir Heroicus Sublimis) in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has decided that the usual critical questions – what does this painting mean, what is it trying to say ...”

“... more perilous, Nadezhda Mandelstam. Her manuscript, not yet entitled Hope against Hope, I had read at her kitchen table and then, with her blessing, sent to the West. It was not a time for too many memoirs. Lourié was my entrée to Akhmatova. Some year or so after the interview in Manhattan, I was arrested by a vision of scarlet socks covering frail ...”

“... love, my mother, my mother.’ A few days after her mother’s death, panic-stricken, unable to read, roaming the house, she says that the journal she is writing is an ‘attempt to salvage part of our lives, to understand, but first to salvage’. Alzheimer’s is a disease that seems to be about forgetting, but is actually about remembering: what is ...”

“... a few lines on one side of it; Moore’s vast archive of unpublished poetry was drawn on by Peter Riley for two posthumous collections, Lacrimae Rerum (1988) and Longings of the Acrobats (1990), but for the most part sleeps undisturbed in the Cambridge University Library. Moore’s few, but fervent, admirers are hoping that a fresh Selected to be ...”

“... the world. Autism was seen as outside the realm of regular human functioning. When Oliver Sacks read Temple Grandin’s 1986 memoir, Emergence: Labelled Autistic, he thought Grandin’s co-author, Margaret Scariano, must have written it. ‘The autistic mind, it was supposed at that time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and ...”

“... could not avoid a damage assessment on Philby. His 30-page report, according to CIA officers who read it, was poorly constructed and very uninformative – ‘an attempt to turn the spotlight away from Philby’. Yet to himself he was forced to admit that everything Philby had learnt about the CIA had come from the very officer whose job it was to protect ...”

“... never can taste the joy of Elysium, because it is a spiritual joy & they cannot perceive it. When Peter Gay wrote about the sensual life of the Victorians, he cited the Hawthornes as an exemplary pair, remarking how their talk of ‘holy’ kisses sanctified their evident delight in the satisfactions of the flesh. But Herbert is more inclined to emphasise the ...”

“... of them rejected all historical applications of psychoanalysis as inherently unreliable. Yet as Peter Gay has aptly pointed out, insofar as every historian operates with a theory of human nature, every historian is inescapably an amateur psychologist. The choice is not whether to use psychology or not, but whether to borrow the insights of professional ...”