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“... Quite, said Buckley. ‘Just one such reply from Reagan deflates the article by Mr Holden on the “arcane aphorisms” of candidate Reagan.’ Though no botanist, and indeed blessed with a thinner recall of my schooldays than the rising septuagenarian, I rest my case. For an encephalograph on the brains behind Reagan it is necessary, with a ...”

“... 270 pages, excluding appendices. But of course the Prince of Wales is not ordinary; and much of Mr Holden’s book is not about the Prince but about the British Monarchy, its recent history and putative future. Prince Charles is certainly at the centre of the book; but the difficulties in the way of getting to know him (or any member of the Royal Family) are ...”

“... that Charles will soldier on magnificently, but only if he shows Camilla the door. Conversely, Anthony Holden and A.N. Wilson want him to step down, but disagree over who should replace him. And Dennis Friedman puts the whole Windsor mess down to bad parenting, and believes that if only future royal mums stayed at home ‘the fatal flaw which appears ...”

“... shortlist was announced, he appeared on Channel 4’s Late Night Poker, seated at the table with Anthony Holden, Patrick Marber, Al Alvarez and Stephen Fry. It was a close, colourful game – Holden was the wiliest of the players and picked up seven grand. The stakes will be higher on Booker night, but it’s hard to ...”

“... more tightly than the truth allows. Not that this has prevented him writing a considerable book. Anthony Holden deals with both halves of Hunt’s life in The Wit in the Dungeon, the title a pleasant theft from Byron, one of Leigh Hunt’s many visitors in prison. One says of an improvident friend or spendthrift offspring that he doesn’t know the ...”

“... Anthony Holden’s is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the Sussex countryside, still swimming occasional lengths of his pool in the altogether and attending the first nights of the three children who have followed Joan Plowright and himself into the theatre ...”

“... of Shakespeare’s Wife, I can’t imagine that any biographer will ever again dare suggest (as Anthony Holden recently has) that Ann was ‘a homely wench’ who may have ‘set out to catch herself a much younger husband by seducing him’, or that Shakespeare married her only because she became pregnant after ‘a careless roll in the hay of a ...”

“... lifeless. At times I was reminded by Dr Erickson’s style of such modern studies of royalty as Anthony Holden’s life of the Prince of Wales and Robert Lacey’s study of the present Queen, Majesty. The point about these books is that they are rather jolly. They may not tell you anything earth-shaking that you did not know before, since their main ...”

“... something quite different. This can most easily be seen in his extended discussion of Masterson v. Holden, a case involving two gay men arrested in 1986 for kissing and other ‘overt homosexual conduct’ at a bus stop in Oxford Street at 1.55 a.m. Two heterosexual couples who were passing by were offended, although the gay couple was ‘wholly unaware ...”

“... a number of books, contracts a number of marriages and meets just about everyone worth meeting. Anthony Powell and Henry Green are his contemporaries at Oxford; he takes tea with Ottoline Morrell and twits Virginia Woolf. Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh are London acquaintances. Picasso sketches his portrait, Hemingway is a fellow war correspondent, and ...”

“... of her brother at Dunkirk; and, while Eileen was grieving for her mother, ‘pounced’ on Inez Holden) to ‘patri-magic’. ‘Patriarchy,’ Funder says, ‘is the doublethink that allows an apparently “decent” man to behave badly to women.’That is surely true, but it may also be itself a kind of doublethink. It’s one of the potentially ...”

“... she is, right and beautiful!’) owes something to the sadistic headmistress of St Bride’s, Miss Holden. ‘As Pam finally pulled Marie’s tunic down over her black-stockinged legs Miss Holden, pausing only to snatch a cane from the cupboard in the wall, gripped Marie by her hair and, with strength lent by anger, forced ...”