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“... their Jews as propagators of the enemy language. From the age of the Enlightenment, the Jewish love-affair with German thought and literature, though sometimes reciprocated, was more often scorned and ridiculed by the writers in whose culture they sought their secular salvation. Of the monstrous irony of this predicament Professor Mayer says not a word ...”

“... New York the previous year Auden had sometimes been in tears, telling Isherwood no one would ever love him and that he would never have any sexual success. True to form on this second visit it was Isherwood who already had a date lined up: Vernon, ‘a beautiful blond boy, about eighteen, intelligent with very sexy legs’. From that out-of-the-body ...”

“... Lord, Joseph – he’ll hear us – he’ll help us – he’ll comfort us in our time of need, love – he will.” “That’s what I want, to deliver myself up to the Lord.” Then my Mrs said, “Now Joseph, you’re easier – you’re comforted – are you not Joseph?” and he answered, “Yes.” ’ But Anne Lister’s writing has a quality not ...”

“... His T.S. Eliot Lecture that year widened the definition to include chicken-soup anthologisers, Harold Pinter’s righteously angry protest verse, and any poetic therapist who mistakes ‘the jargon of self-help’ for the tough process of writing. By trying to make poetry ‘accessible’, the popularisers flatter the poet into thinking deep feelings are ...”

“... about wildly for information, however inconsequential, that might spark a reader’s interest. ‘Harold and Virginia Knapik, as it turned out, were undercover CIA. Another unusual thing about them is that they were first cousins – his brother was married to her sister.’ Not only irrelevant but nonsense – that’s not what constitutes first ...”

“... formed Communist group march by, I saw in the middle of the marchers a barman whom I had grown to love for his winning smile and general meekness. His fist was raised; he was roaring out some radical slogan. He was not simply looking for better wages for barmen, but wanted, it seemed, something new for all mankind. Another night, as I wandered in the Plaza ...”

“... housing than others,’ she wrote, inelegantly but sincerely, in her autobiography. People who love her in spite of her stance on grammar schools rather than because of it, are in love with a particular vision of her, and not with her politics. So if her popularity wasn’t based on her political achievements or her ...”

“... age of prurience of what went on in the new lift between Jessy and William; recycled gossip about Harold Laski that he had probably fabricated in the first place; golden memories of Lionel Robbins’s steely eloquence; affectionate embroidery of R.H. Tawney’s old clothes. With anecdotage piled on apocrypha in an innocent affirmation of corporate ...”

“... economic and social justice a Presidential responsibility and a public trust. As recently as 1940, Harold Laski was still crying out for leadership, leadership, leadership, and insisting, against Madison’s caution, that ‘power is also opportunity, and to face danger with confidence is the price of its fulfilment.’ His polemical text, The American ...”

“... he perceived as a genuine talent.’ Curiously enough, Agate also ‘nurtured the talent’ of Harold Hobson, who was to be the powerful reviewer of the Sunday Times when Tynan was on the Observer. According to James Harding, Hobson unknowingly benefited from Agate’s personal problems. The proprietor of the Sunday Times had heard a story about Agate ...”

“... era, like Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake: the Last of the English of 1866 and Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold: Last of the Saxon Kings from 18 years before. King Alfred has a certain dim life in general awareness, but most educated people would be hard put to go past him, Harold and maybe Ethelred the Unready in a list of ...”

“... At first Dickens tried to deny that Harold Skimpole, the parasitical aesthete of Bleak House, had been based on his friend Leigh Hunt; but later he confessed, not a little proudly, that the character was ‘the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words . . . it is an absolute reproduction of a real man ...”

“... both with the typescripts from which the printer worked ... and with the published books’? Only love could have moved a mountain the size of Wolfe’s scribblings, we might conclude, were the resulting biography not so bereft of affectionate touches. Donald’s methods require that the facts be allowed to speak for themselves with the least possible ...”

“... the best; you need a network of alliances and debts. Politicians buy friends just as customers buy love from prostitutes. When out of office, Heseltine prefers to conduct his affairs from his place of business rather than the Commons. That’s a reasonable thing to do, but not for someone who is seeking votes there. In fact, there’s always been a suspicion ...”

“... uneasily between the back and the front half of the New Statesman. He was inclined to see (and love) his ‘negroes’ as sculptures, objets d’art, patterns of dance, to be described to British readers in an amoral aesthetic way: but there were spasms of humane indignation at the French mode of government and, as a concomitant, a growing respect for the ...”