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“... between Intelligence agencies looks real, and all the rest looks like fantasy. Like the young Michael Innes, Sarah Caudwell both respects and flouts the conventions of the detective story. Thus was Adonis murdered is a very modern novel using the archaic epistolary method of Clarissa: aptly enough, because it has as much to do with seduction as with ...”

“... and sees that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected Vietnamese ...”

“... many documents and interviewed dozens of helpful people, many of them now dead. But the assiduous Michael Shelden has found lots more paper, and interviewed not only the survivors on Crick’s list but others whom his predecessor did not come upon. His book is as long as Crick’s and inevitably repeats much that is in the earlier work, so it was all the more ...”

“... partly by government attention to the long-term resource situation. Gray stands with Hayek and Michael Polanyi in regarding the epistemic character of markets as their greatest virtue: markets can transmit through price signals a vast amount of local information about economic conditions and initiatives that simply cannot be made available for general use ...”

“... at others it was V. Nabokov, Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, Véra Nabokov and for special occasions, J.G. Smith. Those in the know addressed themselves to the complete set: ‘Dear V and V’. Véra’s individuality was most publicly evident in her Jewishness. Unlike her husband, she was a double exile: a refugee from the Bolsheviks and from Russian ...”

“... has brought more professional skill to the debasement of British public life than you,’ Michael Heseltine recently taunted Mandelson, who beamed back appreciatively. Indeed, so fixed has Mandelson become in the political imagination as Tony Blair’s Rasputin and High Priest of Spin that he is sometimes still dismissed as a bit of a cartoon ...”

“... from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a sly coyness that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided country, was a ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... were 17N’s principal targets, for supporting the Nato bombing of Serbia. Curiously enough, as Michael Llewellyn Smith, a former British ambassador, reports in Athens: A Cultural and Literary History, the young Blair, on a student holiday in 1974, had witnessed the triumphant return of the exiled Constantine Karamanlis ...”

“... up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner directing. To date I’ve written two drafts of the script and am halfway through a third.The house where the story happened, 23 Gloucester Crescent in ...”

“... Perhaps the real test of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of ...”

“... When the modern reader makes the transition from merely dreaming along with Jane Grigson or Delia Smith to trying a recipe, the imperatives resume their familiar role. But this cannot have been the case with a book such as Household Management, or not for much of the time. How did the following sentence function? ‘Send [the pancakes] to table, and continue ...”

“... behind this measure came from organisations like the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. To the boffins there the publicly-owned National Bus Company was a vast octopus whose tentacles were strangling competition all over Britain. They dreamed instead of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small bus companies competing with one another ...”

“... here nor there. For the last couple of years the Royal Society of Literature under its chairman Michael Holroyd has been lobbying the Heritage Lottery Fund to release money for the acquisition of the papers of living British authors. On 9 April, Ferdinand Mount used his pulpit in the TLS to add reasoned support for a long-term policy of preserving the ...”

“... the record for the most unpopular leadership duo ever, breaking the record set by Thatcher and Michael Foot in December 1981. The roots of this disillusionment extend back many years, well before the 2016 referendum. Many have highlighted the role played by the 2009 expenses scandal. Nevertheless, a plebiscite does particular violence to the faith on which ...”