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“... Revolution. Defoe boasted of wearing a mourning ring that had been given at the funeral of Christopher Love, a Presbyterian minister beheaded in 1653 for his part in a plot to overthrow Cromwell. Defoe mentions Love in his 1704 pamphlet The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge – it is reprinted in W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank’s excellent ...”

“... to publish. ‘My book problems are complicated and I would like to ask your advice,’ he told Christopher Ricks. ‘My new book is a small one, some eighty poems … the story of changing marriages, not a malice or sensation, far from it, but necessarily, according to my peculiar talent, very personal. Lizzie is naturally very much against it. I am ...”

“... up the volume of her narrative and as an earnest of its credentials (‘I have undertaken to set forth in a critical manner Freud’s life’). The revised list of charges includes Freud the rapist of his niece and seducer of his sister-in-law as well as ‘Freud the organiser of a clinical gulag, the demoniacal, incestuous, lying, counterfeiting, fascist ...”

“... found rooftops, where they perched, seeming to be immobile, but moving an inch or two back and forth on their claws. All summer, they did this incessantly on the roof over my bedroom; they made their irritating little noises against the slate of the roof through the night until I came to believe that they and their parents had been sent by some force of ...”

“... over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth.’ Which is why Freud’s only instruction to patients – the sacrosanct but some would say increasingly neglected founding principle of analysis – was to ...”

“... when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for ...”

“... where Israeli propaganda seems to lead a life of its own. Whereas, in 1975, Michael Adams and Christopher Mayhew were able to write about a coherent but unstated policy of unofficial British press censorship, according to which unpleasant truths about Zionism were systematically suppressed, the situation is not nearly as obvious so far as the British ...”

“... to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but, on the whole, in the warmth and grace ...”

“... as Hermione Lee says, ‘has so much to do with blame.’ Biographers deal in the back and forth of accusations. I could sniff the mud clinging to them, and if I somehow knew they might bore or disgust me, it may be that I feared they might excite me too. But most of all I felt, still feel, instinctively nervous about putting words into people’s ...”

“... upon the battlements and stare/On the foundations of a house’, sending our imaginations forth to ‘call/Images and memories/From ruin’.On Wednesday, 14 June, people in the community and some who worked in the media, along with certain MPs, began talking up the numbers of casualties, claiming that there ‘had to be’ four hundred or more ...”