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“... biography. John Gore chronicled the inner man, his tastes, hobbies and friendships; and Harold Nicolson described his public life and times. Nicolson’s book in particular did as much to confirm George’s reputation as a good king as it did to confirm his own reputation as a good writer, and established a model for royal biography successfully ...”

“... early English history which Every Schoolboy Knows – Alfred and the Cakes, Canute and the Waves, Harold and the Arrow – only the last has any claim to be in a real sense true (and even that has only recently been rescued from understandable scepticism by painstaking scholarship). The legends discussed in these books concern Robin Hood, the early history of ...”

“... on, the situation was very different, although economic expertise was no panacea for success: both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were far more aware of the economic problems of their time than Eden was of those in his. Yet neither was able to do much to solve them. Eden’s life spanned the years between the heyday of Britain’s imperial grandeur and her ...”

“... In 1964, Harold Wilson described the record of the (outgoing) Conservative government as ‘13 wasted years’. If the present Parliament lasts its full term – as seems likely – the electorate will be asked to pass judgment on 13 years of Labour rule. Voters today seem to have the same view of Labour as Wilson had of the Tories all those years ago ...”

“... Lies, whispered, of friends’ indiscretions; instances of envy – when we hate the people we love; peccadillos; filched office supplies; inflated expense accounts; violent obsessions of all kinds; reckless speeding; a fender bender whose scene we left; the belt from Macy’s we slipped into our own belt loops (they’re the easiest thing to take); a copy ...”

“... of acting with the person in question. ‘A sweetie? Are we talking about the same person?’ ‘Harold Pinter? Can you be serious?’ ‘She’s a bit …’ with a tipping of the elbow to indicate drink taken. I’ve often thought of putting such a session in a play, but unless the names of real actors are used it wouldn’t work.24 January. Watch a DVD of ...”

“... mergers. Many proved disastrous. Hamilton-Paterson is excellent on this. He has a real, critical love of cars, and clearly a passion for motorbikes: his chapter on Triumph and its merger with several other motorbike companies is vivid, knowledgeable and shocking. ‘A combination of appalling mismanagement, personal rivalries, union intransigence and sheer ...”

“... them. What is in question is finding the suitable, the sufficient language for this conflict. When Harold Bloom writes with his useful (and usual) fervour about Eliot that ‘to have been born in 1888, and to have died in 1965, is to have flourished in the Age of Freud, hardly a time when Anglo-Catholic theology, social thought and morality were central to the ...”

“... It’s an adroitly engineered terminal twist which turns us back to those questions about love, identity and nationality to which this novel is too intelligent and too humane to pretend to have easy answers. In Hidden in the Heart Foxborough manoeuvres Bested into becoming his biographer, and the novel’s narrator wonders if her dead lover has in ...”

“... plumbing was also pretty ancient. Ved shivered in his room but took comfort in the knowledge that Harold Macmillan had shivered there before him. (One day Macmillan dropped into his old quarters and found Mehta stretched out on a sofa. ‘He must think that the college has gone to the dogs.’) Would Ved’s co-students also take this view? At dinner he ...”

“... and elsewhere, is irredeemably obscure. Certain poetic properties – earth, air, the moon, blood, love, solitude, germination and the like – recur in combinations that begin to look merely kaleidoscopic. It is hard for the empirical English mind not to suspect Neruda of being a trifle slapdash in some of his effects: Felstiner’s earnest and cautious ...”

“... worked for handled opium as well as tea. This doesn’t come as a surprise; the bad character of Harold Anderson, his father’s boss, had been telegraphed early on: ‘that chap always gave me an uneasy feeling. Something fishy about him. There was something fishy about the whole damn business.’ Similarly, we are warned that there is ‘something ...”

“... time the speaker has fallen completely – perhaps the right word is “irretrievably” – in love. The object of his love was a young man who soon afterwards met his death, it would seem by drowning.’ When Eliot learned of this ‘new interpretation’ of his most famous poem, he at once instructed his solicitors to ...”

“... Hotel’. It was where she worked. Funny the sign hasn’t faded more. Tourists must love it. Proof if you need proof. He got two books out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to ...”

“... after 1947 involved the ignis fatuus of a powerful British presence East of Suez. As late as 1965, Harold Wilson declared that Britain’s frontier was on the Himalayas. Cruel mayhem in Palestine, the debacle at Suez, inglorious doings in Cyprus and Aden, were all largely the result of this mirage. Brutality and illegality marred the superficially successful ...”