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“... we gleaned from German encrypted messages, but the chief of the SIS dissuaded him. Through Peter Floud, the brother of Bernard Floud, a Party member he had met in the Intelligence Corps, James arranged a meeting with a Russian who seemed to be an embassy official. (Sixty years later, after James’s death, it emerged that this was probably Ivan ...”

“... advised along those lines by his national defence procurement officer, an old friend called Peter Levene whom Heseltine had promoted to high office, in controversial circumstances, at a starting salary of £95,000 a year. Levene had been chairman of United Scientific Holdings, whose recent success had been based to a large degree on the cooperation of ...”

“... is that the Labour ministers who eventually took over after her fall were in awe of her and keen to do her will. Her Tory successors have been regarded as cruder Thatcherites than Thatcher, but have possibly been more successful than her in dishing the welfare state. Less shrill than their mentor, they did by stealth what they have so far done in their ...”

“... This new urbanity contrasts with the ‘reptilian indifference to one another’ (Walsh quotes Peter Hill’s memorable phrase) of the instrumental lines in the introduction to The Rite of Spring. The symphony’s finale, ‘with its dazzling fugal and imitative exchanges, breathes a refinement that civilises the ferocity, without in any way drawing its ...”

“... enough to deter Ashraf – or the Lords Chalfont and Weidenfeld, who turn up later at Princes Gate keen as mustard. Radji has sprinkled enough famous names through the diary to ensure a substantial readership. But how much good advice and informed opinion did he get for all his fine food and good wine? And was he really prepared to listen to unwelcome but true ...”

“... have been known for years and have been drawn on by biographers and critics like Morton Cohen and Peter Berresford Ellis. Here the Haggard collector and enthusiast D.S. Higgins has selected about one-fortieth of the text and presented it in an edition which deserves to be called amateur. He has not indicated omissions by ellipses, the annotation is ...”

“... crewmembers didn’t. The battle ended in a truce. Palsson wonders why Hans Jonathan ‘was so keen to join the military power that had enslaved him’. Perhaps he was just swept up in the fervour that descended on the city, an atmosphere in which ‘every citizen of Copenhagen felt like a warrior,’ according to a letter written by Charlotte ...”

“... off for Wales and Ireland, he had abandoned the hunt. Throughout the letters, however, he seems keen to draw attention to his delight in female company, archly alluding to a brief liaison with the famous singer Henriette Sontag, and, mysteriously, to a nude painted by Titian which comes to life for his benefit (and which presumably cost him a great deal of ...”

“... obvious antecedent’, Degas’s Women in Front of a Café – which I had also put forward. Peter Wollen claims that the urban Sunlight on Brownstones depicts a place ‘not located in the city’. He can’t know Manhattan’s Upper West Side near Riverside Park, where Hopper liked to walk, looking for subjects. He states that ‘Hopper bought his ...”

“... the levels of infection brought it to general attention. ‘This variant became of interest,’ Peter Horby, the chairman of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), said on 23 December, ‘because there was an investigation of the increasing case numbers in Kent in early December, despite the national ...”

“... of those ‘traditional social and cultural exclusions’ of which the new humanities men are so keen to discover unconscious traces in their predecessors. A self-made man of letters, Pritchett had none of the subsidies and privileges that post-war intellectuals came to expect the state and the university to shower on them. He found the Russian, French and ...”

“... that the same Tories who believe in Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism should also be so keen on Iron Dukes. The second point, and the more Ravenesque, concerns the torrent of bullshit and redtape into which Labourism has intermittently plunged the country. In the case of post-1945 Austerity: ‘Everything about the class system was left intact ...”

“... the ring, he would always look like a killer. Or as he put it ‘I do not come to pitty-patty.’ Peter Heller’s biography of Tyson* is a blend of cool hyperbole and keen insight into the logic of the boxing business: matching your fighter with the right opponents, boosting his prestige by dosing his appearances, nudging ...”

“... hesitantly into working-men’s establishments (but never into the sporting locker room). I was keen to learn what secret power plays he had discovered behind the closed doors of elite clubland. In fact there aren’t any, and he makes only a passing claim for the continuing political significance of clubs – for oligarchs and spies, apparently. Can this ...”

“... for statehood jostled anxiously in the corridors alongside those who’d been formally invited, ‘keen as saints for a front seat on Judgment Day’. Into their midst glided a young, clever and passionately idealistic clerk from the Foreign Office, Harold Nicolson, who had left his wife in the arms of others but found consolation in dreams of the glorious ...”