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“... me of the intricate, dissonant classical music I’d learned about growing up. And there was Kim Gordon, lined up between Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, in the middle of the huge stage, not a token girl bass player, not a riot grrrl in an angry all-girl band, but a musician among musicians, standing next to her husband, to all appearances ...”

“... sunny afternoon last May at Kuntsevo Cemetery on the western outskirts of Moscow, when they buried Kim Philby. Guy Burgess had died in 1963, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean in 1983. Philby, however, was still alive when I started work in Moscow as the Independent’s correspondent there in early 1987, and his presence was a source of recurrent ...”

“... During Liars’ Week at the Labour Party Conference last month – when Gordon pretended that he still had a lot of time for Tony, on hearing which Cherie said that’s a lie, but being overheard herself had to deny she’d said any such thing, though the next day Tony more or less admitted that her denial wasn’t to be trusted either, before going on to pretend that he still admired Gordon too, and then pledging himself to the cause of peace in the Middle East – it was no surprise that the boldest liar of all came out on top ...”

“... on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often diminished rather than brightened their radiance. At that level, Imperial energy and Imperial virtue could ...”

“... MI5 officer Nicholas Elliott, whose finest hour in the British secret service was to denounce Kim Philby in time for the spy to run to Moscow; and Paul Spicer, Rowland’s devoted bagman, who is well known to every journalist who ever asked a question about Lonrho and had it suavely deflected. But Tiny’s greatest catch was perhaps his second ...”

“... novelist. As judicious (though not hopelessly balanced) accounts, the new biographies by Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor confirm what the law of averages might have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable and the rest of it false. (Scott Lucas, by contrast, thinks almost all of it true.) Orwell was indeed ...”

“... that nothing slips into the crevices between sentences appears to be the obsessive purpose of Mary Gordon’s family saga, The Other Side. This is the story of Ellen MacNamara, implacable, combative, Irish, tender nurse of grudges and rancours, mother and grandmother to sundry Americans who act their intricate parts around her sickbed while she lies dreaming ...”

“... bleakest of which is called the Kyle of Tongue. The King’s right-hand man – Brendan Urquhart-Gordon, a.k.a. ‘Bugger’ – has chosen chastity over ‘the reification of his schoolyard nickname’; the King’s own nickname is ‘Hotty’, and his chief manservant is called Love. So Hotty and Bugger get to sit around calling for ‘Two large Remy ...”

“... them down on the bar, demanding a large Scotch, in … a faint Irish accent’. It will give you Kim Philby’s astute judgment on le Carré’s work: ‘Although his plots were more complicated than anything within my own experience, they were good reading after all that James Bond nonsense … Actually, I have all his books and have enjoyed them ...”