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“... ripe enough to be king of Albania, a country which twice offered him the throne? After finishing Margaret FitzHerbert’s excellent book the reader may be in two minds; at least King Aubrey would have wielded the sceptre with more panache than Lord Rothermere on the throne of Hungary. Herbert was the son of the fourth Earl of Carnarvon. His half-brother, the ...”

“... is felt usually more in short lines than long, though some, such as Yearsley and Charlotte Smith, are successful in iambic pentameter blank verse. Poets from Rowe through Yearsley sometimes express an impatient sense of the limitations of language itself, ‘the human line/ Of alphabets (misused)’ (Yearsley), even while they express pleasure in ...”

“... Richmond. He joyfully extended his favours to other members of the Royal Family, such as Princess Margaret, who he once flew free to her hols in Sardinia. Reminding Ogilvy all the while of his secret share options, signed and sealed in the Bahamas, Tiny retained the services of the royal husband for 12 years – until finally Ogilvy was forced to resign in ...”

“... For example: the top five consolidated publishing groups – Bertelsmann, Pearson, News Corp, W.H. Smith and Holtzbrinck – were responsible for a whopping 49.3 per cent of sales in the General Retail Market in 2000; grim news for independents (News Corp’s figures include those of Fourth Estate, swallowed by HarperCollins last July), though in these ...”

“... in ‘daylight upon magic’. But the damn phrase is inescapable. The fascination of Princess Margaret, I suspect, is that she was the forerunner of the public, vulgar Windsor style: now such a drag but then such a sensation. If you were a commoner of average social mobility in London in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, there was a better than average ...”

“... of the older novel might darken or distort the new one. In the present case it doesn’t. Zadie Smith’s real debt may not lie in her echoes of Howards End, though she does insist on them. Two families of very different temperaments are forced to confront one another when in On Beauty, as in Howards End, a sudden engagement is announced and almost at once ...”

“... constantly repeated horror stories (princesses stoned to death for adultery, the inevitable Helen Smith case), her fury at how little she – or the other Europeans – understand the Saudis. Frances becomes obsessed with the empty flat immediately above hers, with rumours that someone high up in the Government is using it for an adulterous liaison. She ...”

“... passive role which the Arts Council adopted as a conduit between artist and public: a policy, Margaret Garlake remarks, ‘designed less to inspire than to avoid giving offence’. Despite this, the major exhibitions which the Arts Council mounted at the Tate Gallery during the immediate postwar years greatly enlivened its near-moribund exhibition ...”

“... us to prosperity and liberty but at the price of atomising our picture of the world. The labourer, Smith writes, is ‘not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private ...”

“... and afterwards mayor of St Laurent-le-Nouveau: not exactly a trimmer, not exactly a coward. Margaret Forster’s Mother Can You Hear Me? is well-titled and the answer is no. To my knowledge, there is no official Daughter’s Day yet, but this book is one long high-pitched celebration of the situation of daughter misunderstood by mother. There are three ...”

“... and his mother in particular. It is no accident that, as Taylor quotes John Vincent saying, Margaret Thatcher was ‘the point at which all snobberies meet’, for she represented the compacted prejudices of the nation. The dislike she aroused was couched in terms of condescension that had nothing to do with policy. Mary Warnock objected to her ...”

“... was also, in a sense, a conscious and loving masochist in relation to her father and family, and Margaret Forster has done an admirable job in investigating what really went on among them. It takes two – or rather three – to make an Andromeda, and Elizabeth herself was a powerful unit in a close-knit Compton-Burnett family, who all recognised in their ...”

“... Party became vacant in 1965 Sir Keith was a Heath man: he lobbied for him and recruited Margaret Thatcher to that camp. Heath, to all appearances, was to bring into being a new radical form of Conservatism, which was known in the run-up to the 1970 Election as the politics of ‘Selsdon Man’, after the hotel where the strategists drew up the ...”

“... and (even more ludicrously) is endowed with a romantic yearning for Mr Knightley worthy of Harriet Smith herself. A line in feminist literary criticism takes Jane Fairfax, along with Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility, as an exemplary figure of the repressions and suppressions which Austen’s art both questions and practises. But of this struggle ...”

“... does not simply turn him back into Charles. The triple cross appears to be complete – Charles to Smith to Charles – but . . . he does not become himself . . . again; he merely masquerades as himself. It is not only Charles who wears a mask and swaps identities: Paula, too, assumes a mask to become once more what she is, his wife. In the very ...”