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“... reason to be grateful for the periods politicians spend in opposition. Roy Jenkins’s Asquith, Anthony Crosland’s reflections on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the ...”

“... long ago for British Intelligence. George Blake was very left-wing, and is now slightly less so. Anthony Cavendish has always been very right-wing. Both authors write of their profound respect for one of their former bosses, George K. Young. Young, who died recently, was deputy head of MI6 until he joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in 1961. One of ...”

“... close, it is important to know about the 22 million people who live there in hermetic isolation. Anthony Daniels’s The Wilder Shores of Marx describes journeys to North Korea, Albania, Romania, Vietnam and Cuba around the time of the collapse of Communism in 1989. Daniels chose his redoubts well: two were the last European dictatorships to fall; the other ...”

“... Hugh Cameron, a poet of little reputation, with whom Lorin had some sort of affair down in Key West before her premature death. Polly is quite sure that Jones is ‘an old-fashioned male chauvinist’, and almost equally sure that Cameron is an exploiter, a slob. Indeed, Jones, after answering all her questions in a way she didn’t expect and doesn’t ...”

“... Mother’. There is no corresponding chapter on ‘My Father’. The sprightly daughter of a West Country clergyman, Frances Milton waited until she was 30 before making a good match with a London barrister. Thomas Anthony Trollope had professional prospects and ‘expectations’ of a rich, unmarried and conveniently ...”

“... It is just one fragment among a torrent of primary-source material relentlessly amassed by Anthony Julius in his history of English anti-semitism, gathered both from England and from the wider background of Christian culture in Europe, to which he adds streams of secularism and Islam when his story approaches modern times. The maelstrom of original ...”

“... The first mental health clinic in Senegal – perhaps the most Westernised region of French West Africa – was not built until 1956. And in any of these colonies there were places for hundreds, at most, of the mentally-ill in populations of many millions. Only where there were significant European settler populations – in Algeria, Southern ...”

“... to persuade the Egyptians that he was, as Victor Hugo later phrased it, ‘the Mohammad of the West’, and that Islam and the Rights of Man could be made compatible, was a tragi-comic disaster. But its cultural impact on Europe was considerable. A form of ‘Egyptomania’ gripped Britain and France, spawning an entire decorative and architectural style ...”

“... manner, where farce reigns, academia abuts. The Catafalque is a fusty art institute in London’s West End, a Dickensian pile which houses the varying degrees of ‘wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, light and darkness, hope and despair ... and just as one tolerates a lot of nonsense in Dickens, a lot of it was tolerated here.’ Around this core ...”

“... academic (though some of this material has been published before in his earlier autobiography West Briton). But the heart of his book is probably his account of the nine years he spent on the Spectator. Even in those days – the paper, by my count, has been through five successive owners since – the Spectator was very much a rich man’s plaything. In ...”

“... a much more straightforward, much less partisan memoir of a visit Plath and Hughes made to the West of Ireland in the autumn of 1962, and of what followed. But even here I had a strong feeling that he, too, had been recruited – not by Anne Stevenson – to redress the balance. Again, I don’t at all question the truth of Murphy’s account: for what ...”

“... and globules of pure fact rise to the surface, the dishomogeneity annoys. Some reviewers of Anthony Burgess’s new novel say it has curdled: ‘so let’s say he does know all Walton’s percussion parts by heart, and has the Hebrew or the Russian word for almost anything, is he able to use them to tell a better story?’ I think he is. In Any Old Iron ...”

“... for the New Republic. He covered striking textile workers in Massachusetts, militant miners in West Virginia and suicides in industrial cities. His pieces concerned social conflict and ruined lives, but Wilson had a deep interest in the new industrial world that was still taking shape. His informants made clear to him that time itself took a new form in ...”

“... The state of play over the biographising of Anthony Eden is one of some interest. He offered the task to the late Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, author of many major books including a study of the Munich crisis and the official biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime ...”

“... of a Spanish interpreter, Josias Doria, they appointed three men – Christoffel Capitano, Anthony and Francisco – as their heirs. Diogo and the three witnesses were familiar with the location. They had been to the notary’s office before, to authorise Josias Doria to collect wages owed to them by a shipmaster – perhaps these were among the assets ...”