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“... One of the things that used to surprise Westerners about China was the willingness of individuals to suffer the inhumane treatment meted out by their superiors. For years on end they would patiently submit to frightful indignities, so that one despaired of their ever rebelling. But when it did all boil over, the deferential bowers and scrapers would whip themselves into a frenzy of extreme violence ...”

“... The idea of China is elusive. Not only was its civilisation different from those that shaped the West, but it flowed earlier and more continuously – and mutual contact was tenuous. The picture of China that we carry in our heads is a misleading collage. It builds first on the exaggerated respect paid to Chinese institutions by the French Enlightenment in the 18th century, and is then overlaid by the risible images of China’s feeble response to Western imperialism in the 19th century, and now in the 20th century by the figure of that extraordinary half-god, half-demon, Mao Zedong ...”

“... it is a great deal deader in this segment of the population than in any other. That the Attlee and Wilson governments had such a heavy complement of Oxbridge intellectuals owed as much to the fact that deference still existed at the grass roots of the Labour Party in the Thirties and Forties as it did to the willingness of graduates to put themselves ...”

“... the loyalties of those who seek a party of conscience and reform. Even after his death, when Wilson built on the foundations which Gaitskell had laid, Labour looked an acceptable alternative for Conservative defectors. It must be doubtful whether anything Grimond might have done, whether by a campaign of Thorpean razmataz, or for that matter by a ...”

“... On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians ...”

“... are still hard at it on 31 December. We are surely fortunate that Barbara Castle – like the late Dick Crossman – is in the second category. And when Mrs Castle keeps a diary, she doesn’t mess about: she really keeps a diary. The indefatigability of her labours was first revealed four years ago, when she published her diaries for the period from 1 January ...”

“... books is the sense they give that the study of China is alive and well. The same cannot be said of Wilson and Grenier’s Chinese Communism. It is not in any obvious sense a bad book; it is certainly not an ill-informed book; it is written quite carefully and clearly. But it is a dead book suggestive of a mummified Pekinology. ‘For all their progressive ...”

“... of money, public adulation and staggering self-belief. ‘I really believe,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, whom he had met at Princeton, that ‘no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation.’ But he was already anticipating his later failure. ‘I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings ...”

“... like a moth beating against a bulb, briefly altering the light. In 1832, Carlyle reviewed John Wilson Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and emphasised, as Hermione Lee has noted, how biography, by recording ‘many a little Reality’, can make the reader see the world as it existed around the central figure, its depths and ...”

“... of Westminster or patrolled the corridors of power in Whitehall during the six years of the first Wilson Government acquired a fund of George Brown stories. The fact that many were so preposterous as to be incredible did not mean that they were untrue. Even when they redounded to Brown’s credit, which they occasionally did, it was quite possible that they ...”

“... of him in terms of lip-biting regret. In fact, let’s have Bill’s dust-jacket endorsement of Dick in full: I think he is, first of all, brilliant, tactically and strategically. Secondly, with me he’s always been very straightforward and honest, the bad news as well as the good and, if possible, the bad news first. Thirdly, he knows how I think, and he ...”

“... he hated. He got through by learning to box, by falling in love with a boy he referred to as ‘Dick’ (actually called George Harcourt Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone, later 3rd Baron Derwent), and by joining a poetry society run by some charismatic masters. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, written in 1929 when he was only 34, that by the end of ...”

“... Sissela Bok’s book illustrates, it is a deep and nearly universal desire of those in power; Des Wilson’s collection of articles powerfully documents and eloquently attacks its special intensity in this country, the most officially secretive among democracies. Sissela Bok’s thoughtful book is not concerned only with official secrets, though they get a ...”

“... Pléiade editions, might have occurred to anybody, but seems to have been first mooted by Edmund Wilson in 1961, when there was already some concern about the inaccessibility of many important American books. The idea was taken up, but in a form Wilson deplored, for the grant money went to minutely, indeed pedantically ...”

“... White is the most ordinary and engaging little man in the world ... Charlie Wilson, the sort of father you see by the hundred in France on Sunday outings ... [Gordon] Goody, nerves of steel and the wolfish handsomeness of the pack leader ... The events were so vividly in the minds of the actors that they remember, like Henry V at ...”