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“... masters, cutting out the ship’s stewards, a Cunard carry-on I did not know about until I read Philip Dawson’s The Liner. Perhaps such things also happened aboard the ‘ocean greyhounds’ of the Axis. Hitler’s dashing duo were the Bremen, which had a catapult-operated light aircraft, and the Europa; Mussolini’s matched pair were the Rex and ...”

“... Tryphena Sparks, Trollope and Kate Field, James and his obscure hurt. So when Monica Jones follows Philip Larkin’ s request by burning his diaries do we feel resentment because the destruction will set an eternal gap between reader and poem? Or is it something lower – frustration at not having served up on some not too distant Sunday the ‘secret ...”

“... In twenty years,’ Lady Astor used to say of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, ‘I’ve never known Philip to be wrong on foreign politics.’ Though Lothian himself thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All ...”

“... amount of Valium, to little effect. (Lowell preferred to think of himself as a bear.) When Carley Dawson, a post-Stafford girlfriend, said something about Shakespeare that Lowell didn’t like, he throttled her and swung her to the floor, his face ‘completely white, completely blank’. In 1961 Lowell met a writer called Sandra Hochman, and immediately ...”

“... into the Round Table, a proto-think tank named after a quarterly started by Milner and edited by Philip Kerr. Much later the group metamorphosed into the Cliveden Set. Fox calls his chapter about the Kindergarten alumni ‘Brain Fag’ (Kerr’s coinage), ‘a form of anti-climactic stress ... contracted from years of cerebral overload at the altitude of ...”

“... mouth (so perplexingly reminiscent of the late ‘my mother-in-law’ British comedian Les Dawson). Somehow, I am always drawn to these short, pyknic or mesomorphic creators, whether they are Brodsky, Benn, Beckmann or my father. As the Nazis came up things grew abruptly tight for Beckmann. He lost his job in Frankfurt (‘public funds for Jew lackeys ...”

“... me about Worship Street, where I lodged in the early days of Beyond the Fringe in 1961. It was a Philip Webb building (date: 1862) with a workshop on the ground floor and accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having ...”

“... thought much about it’. After this avowal of broad-mindedness (the tale has already been told in Philip Williams’s Hugh Gaitskell) she was fit to be introduced to (Sir) Maurice Bowra and all the other intellectual roisterers. Was it really as simple and half-baked as this? Gaitskell, we learn, was ‘eager to fix his own identity through instructing others ...”

“... it spells SEMIT, which leads them to deduce that we are a Jewish-Marxist organisation.’ Geoffrey Dawson, the editor, and a keen appeaser, was dismayed that his paper had been responsible for an increase in international tension. He stood behind Steer rather reluctantly. ‘I do my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt ...”

“... Cliveden and in St James’s Square – had evolved. Now, the Astors frequently invited Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, Nevile Henderson, ambassador to Germany, and Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian, a Christian Scientist like Nancy, and one of several to express the view that in marching into the ...”