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“... the illusions which led them to send money, agents and finally troops into Russian territories. Mr Kettle’s study is the first of four volumes. He has used a far wider range of sources than was available to Professor Richard Ullman when he began his masterly three-volume account of the same events. The title of this first book is somewhat misleading, for the ...”

“... war, for he added: ‘Happily there seems no reason why we should be more than spectators.’ Michael Brock shows with great skill that it was not so much the German invasion of Belgium but the precise nature of that invasion which produced a wide British consensus for war 11 days later. In most cases, then, as ...”

“... done anything, but just the once.’ Barry’s hero here is a retired detective, Tom Kettle. The time is the mid-1990s. Kettle has recently moved into a small flat built onto a 19th-century castle in Dalkey, South Dublin. He likes where he is, enjoys its simple pleasures: his view of the Irish Sea when he sits ...”

“... the All Party Alliance, although a wit said that his only allies were Anthony Morton, Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday and other Creasey pseudonyms.) His books were popular but not highly regarded, and this worried and baffled him. Why, he asked me once, was there thought to be so much difference between Creasey and Shakespeare? Wasn’t Macbeth a crime ...”

“... the pallet, table and two chairs in the room at the top of the sharp and loose coir staircase, a kettle and ashtray before I remembered about food, the streetlamp almost within reach to slide down, fireman-style, im Falle eines Falles, the reflections of car windscreens bouncing on the ceiling, the solicitous Irish landlady, Marie’s sister, saying ‘Are ...”

“... his co-star, still smarting from the review in the Guardian, tried to recruit us into writing to Michael Billington to ask him how, in the name of God, he could be so unmoved. If people ask you to perch your bum among the tubs of talcum powder, solely for the purpose of telling them how wonderful they are, they might at least produce a thimble of ...”

“... by a host of detractors, from 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 ...”

“... is that he’s a die-hard monarchist, as he reveals in his memoir, A Royal Duty (Michael Joseph, £17.99), a book at once agonisingly boring and shamefully fascinating. Much the most interesting bits are the insights into such things as what the Queen has (or used to have) for breakfast: ‘one slice of granary toast, a smear of butter and a ...”

“... court. Most significant is the clandestine relationship she embarks on, early in the novel, with Michael Agnew, a middle-aged, married, Protestant barrister, which leaves its damning traces – the dirt of his car smeared on her hands and face, his scent on her body. She, like the other characters, makes her way by learning to read the signs, scanning faces ...”

“... waiting for her husband. ‘Then there would be no talking, just the ticking of the clock and the kettle humming and the china dogs on the mantelpiece looking, as ever, cross at one another.’ The narrator is embarrassed, because his own writing at this time is full of words like cerulean, azure phantasm and implacable. But when the writer describes the ...”

“... so moveable, that one can pin it down no more closely than by calling it ‘anti-establishment’. Michael Frayn may have excoriated that phrase – in his brief, brilliant introduction to the published text, Beyond the Fringe, in 1963 – as denoting ‘a spacious vacancy of thought’, but really, I don’t see how we can do any better. Any real ...”

“... the small particulars of living: pigeons and shop-window shutters and frock-coated statues, the kettle singing and the bacon sizzling and the morning’s first cigarette, ‘all our trivial daily acts’. And with memories, the contents of the mind’s museum, Ireland and school and Oxford. Everything is there. But precariously ...”

“... from analogue special effects, and it was fun to see him using it to address significant absences. Michael J. Anderson, the Little Man from Another Place, refused to appear after a quarrel about his fee, so his character was replaced by a screeching shrub. The character played by David Bowie, who died before he could shoot his scenes, now lived in a sort of ...”

“... tap water’, as she later notes – through ‘a German filter’ into ‘an Italian electric kettle’, and seeks out a bag of ‘imported Californian tea-substitute’. After a hasty Pilates session, she checks her watch – ‘a Korean clone of an old-school Casio G-Shock’ – and sees that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad ...”

“... séance, and a hotel fire which carries off the intruments of Enderby’s inspiration (an electric kettle and box of strong tea bags), prove these fears well-founded. Yet Enderby himself is hardly at fault. Indeed, he starts to look Shakespearean. Swayed by the Terrebasse company, like the Bard by Burgess, Kemp et al., he gives the public What it Wills, As it ...”