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“... and green of the hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the ...”

“... of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.’ Thus Henry James in the Preface to The Aspern Papers, the germ of which was the story of an American Shelley-worshipper seeking out the eighty-year old Claire Clairmont to trick or wheedle her into handing over precious documents illuminating her youthful relations with ...”

“... often someone available to explain this state of affairs. In Armadillo, for example, it’s George Hogg, an implausibly lyrical loss adjuster. ‘No, my friends,’ he tells his team, ‘life does not run smoothly along tracks that we have laid down . . . However much we seem to have it under control, to have every eventuality covered, all risks taken into ...”

“... AnnieLee has a source of secret pain? OK. A husband, a baby? Or is it some sociopathic Boss Hogg type back in Shit-Town, who treated her horribly when she was somebody else with a double-barrelled Christian name? You get the picture. The past won’t leave AnnieLee alone and she has to be beaten up by a couple of bogeymen who always seem able to find ...”

“... that Trench had been a crusted Tory ever since, at the age of 19, he had campaigned for Quintin Hogg in the ‘appeasement’ by-election in Oxford in 1938. Never mind that drift and complacency were two of Trench’s most enduring characteristics. The arch-flogger, arch-creep and arch-hypocrite had somehow established himself as a wonderful teacher (which ...”

“... who travelled for his work), the abolition clause was dropped. In the Commons debate Quintin Hogg spoke with grim logic: We have just been hanging our defeated enemies after the trials at Nuremberg. They were prosecuted not as an act of war but as an act of what was claimed to be justice … If we were going to say that it was at all times and in all ...”

“... a more simplistic and old-fashioned attitude. But arguably, even some classics of the genre, like Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner or Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, suffer from our getting the point too soon, seeing what the author would be at. This is where Dickens scores so heavily, and Emily Brontë. Who shall say whether Quilp and Little ...”

“... housekeepers, repairs to tennis courts, swimming-pools; there’s even a suggestion that Douglas Hogg claimed for cleaning out his moat. The papers are suddenly full of pictures of Home Counties mansions set in acres of manicured lawns, straight out of Country Life, allegedly maintained at taxpayers’ expense. Proof, in case anyone has forgotten, that the ...”

“... whining about the agony of the Balkans. Hurd and Rifkind, and minor figures such as Douglas Hogg, all fancied themselves as men of steel, cool under fire, especially if it happened to be raining down on Sarajevo. They had their own Ottoman agenda. In their view Bosnian-Serb extremism was merely a case of referred pain: the real problem would surely turn ...”

“... than his father’s because of its connections with royalty (she was remotely descended from King James I of Scotland); at school, he boasted so much about the (alleged) venerability of his title that he was facetiously nicknamed ‘the Old English Baron’. Occasionally the pretension turned more prickly: invited to join a formal procession, he sulked for ...”

“... was the scene of a ‘strange and recurring tragedy’ which provided the point of departure for James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough. The grove was guarded by a wary figure, a priest and a murderer, ever on his guard against an assailant who would try to murder him in order to take his place: ‘Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A ...”

“... resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo ...”

“... in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have ...”

“... in media savvy. He stood among the sureties and supporters: Tony Benn, Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, James Fox and Bella Freud, and the five or so young people I associated with WikiLeaks. We were led up to seats in the gallery they’d saved for friends. As soon as I sat down and looked down at the court I saw Esther Addley of the Guardian. She saw ...”