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“... to Prince Charles at a welcoming ceremony in New Guinea: he maintains a fixed half-smile, but has no idea what the natives are getting excited about. Americans value sincerity, above all, in their presidential candidates, regardless of opinions on specific issues. Obama, Bush Jr, Bill Clinton, Reagan all appeared to mean what they say. Failed candidates ...”

“... Jeremy Corbyn’; ‘Corbyn has the vision, but his numbers don’t yet add up’; ‘Corbyn is no Trotskyist, Watson insists’; ‘Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitic claims’; ‘Corbyn’s Iraq War apology will do him good – if not Labour’; and ‘Rupert Murdoch predicts Corbyn win.’ Above all this, throwing it into the shade and into context, were ...”

“... disembodied voiceover as we accompany the poets to Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 whiskeys that killed him; 23 Fitzroy Road, where Plath laid her head on a folded towel in the gas oven; Missolonghi, per Byron; Rome, to the Keats-Shelley ...”

“... off. I want to give some account of our relationship and go over some of the arguments I can no longer have with him. I first met Peter at a Christmas party at the offices of Studio International, in 1975. He looked etiolated, like a swotty sixthformer given to bad habits behind closed doors. His pale skin, the smoothed-out shape of his head and ...”

“... bladder I find myself having to pee more often, which, when I’m out in the country in a car, is no problem, though like a dog or a creature marking its territory, I do find myself often choosing the same spot. One regular place of worship is a lane on the outskirts of Leeds between Arthington and Harewood. It’s a nice location and of some historic ...”

“... of the inauguration of an academic programme in October 1895, in two rented rooms in what is now John Adam Street. Nor is it unprecedented for someone who has run the School to write about it. One can point to the austere history of the LSE’s foundation by Sir Sydney Caine, or to what Dahrendorf calls ‘William Beveridge’s intriguing London School of ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at his ...”

“... things about them, especially for visitors tramping around in the dark trying to find, say, No. 25, block 5, entrance 3, without benefit of footpaths, adequate lighting or a clear numbering system. The problem is that, on the one hand, Hatherley is bound to reject ‘the architectural views of Charles Windsor’ (elsewhere, he gives him his title) that ...”

“... case would never have had the nerve to speak to him. I’d first heard his voice in Exeter College hall some time in 1955. The lower end of the scholars’ table where I was sitting was only a yard or two from high table where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like ...”

“... evocative account was written by someone who was not there, was indeed so far ‘out of it’ that no one in the family had dreamed of inviting him. And if, given the absence of footnotes for the passages in question, one were to ask how he came by such detail, one possible answer is that he made it up. As this episode may suggest, the author of this book is ...”

“... schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of me Defence ...”

“... was the lineal descendant of the Labour rebellion. But dissent in the Conservative Party presented no comparable threat. Since Harold Macmillan’s first application for membership in 1962, it had been settled policy to join the European Community. Now, with a decisive House of Commons vote behind it, the British would be ‘good Europeans’, at least as long ...”

“... him as laughably small-scale: ‘just kindergarten stuff’. In Vidal’s native land there is no need of cash-for-questions. The deal there is cash-for-answers. And the answers are delivered in the form of ‘special legislation’. In America sleaze makes a difference. At first, the spectacle of Vidal pulling his New World patrician stunt was pretty ...”

“... any of them represent tragedy in the classic or Shakespearean sense.’ (This is because they have no feeling that the sadness and loss are without a purpose.) The tellers of bomb stories, however, were not artists and not historians. They can’t be held guilty of ‘emplotment’, meaning that their interpretation affects their selection of facts, and I get ...”

“... invariably demeaned by its occupant. Sixty years ago this month, the then Tory Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, chose to announce a new Public Order Bill in the course of an offensive and thoroughly partisan speech at Cleckheaton Town Hall which just happened to be delivered in the same week in which Labour’s annual ...”