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“... I should declare an interest. Anthony Sampson in The Changing Anatomy of Britain quotes Lord Denning dismissing attacks on a class-based judiciary: ‘The youngsters believe that we come from a narrow background – it’s all nonsense – they get it from that man Griffith.’ Lord Reid was a distinguished top judge ...”

“... account of how the whisky was served at the Brideshead dinner table, each guest receiving from the butler, if he bespoke it, a decanter holding a quarter-bottle – a ritual which marks the beginning of the descent into hopeless alcoholism of Sebastian Flyte. There is a clear connection between such potent elements of Waugh’s fantasy and the fact that he ...”

“... to Left.’ 4. Nye Bevan called Hugh Gaitskell ‘a desiccated calculating-machine’. 5. Rab Butler said: ‘Sir Anthony Eden is the best prime minister we have.’ 6. Harold Macmillan campaigned in the 1959 Election on the slogan: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising ...”

“... privation, they did so not out of a supererogatory deference to the existing order, but because Butler and Beveridge and the Attlee administration brought about a quiet but enduring revolution. At the same time, the nationalisation of large sections of the industrial base, and an economic climate that was delivering full employment, had shifted power ...”

“... over the temporary triumph of the ‘Tripartite’ system which ensured that, under the 1944 ‘Butler Act’ dispensation of secondary education for all, the majority of schoolchildren were divided into quasi-‘scholarship’ grammar-school sheep and rejected ‘sec. mod.’ goats – comprehensive education in most places came many years later. The ...”

“... of these refugees has increasingly spurred conferences, projects and studies. The books run from Anthony Heilbut’s chatty and smart overview. Exiled in Paradise, to more specialised volumes like Barry Katz’s Foreign Intelligence, which tells the story of the Office of Strategic Services – the predecessor to the CIA that employed a bevy of refugee ...”

“... genius of Lord Woolton and Sir Michael Fraser is diminished by the extravagant encomia for Anthony Barber and Cecil Parkinson. We cannot yet write the history of post-Thatcherite Britain, but perhaps it is not too soon to start summarising the characteristics of its prehistory (roughly 55 BC to 1979). Lord Blake’s categories are a mainstream ...”

“... my pieces passed through the office. In his mind only men were philosophers. The other was Judith Butler. I had written a commentary on one of her books, and she wrote a reply to be published along with it. In the draft of her response, she referred to me by my surname and, once, as ‘he’. Just a few lines later she wrote: ‘It is surely important to ...”

“... with the Wind’ (1992) sends Scarlett and her children to Ireland, where she meets up with Rhett Butler, whose wife has conveniently died, and falls (back) into his arms. There is a paradox implicit in the very concept of the sequel. In experiential terms, a sequel is a highly conservative genre that supplies the comfort of familiarity together with the ...”

“... and also consider him objectively as a focus for speculation. Gossip and speculation go together. Anthony Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, has the engaging habit of pondering, on our behalf, the possible implications of others’ behaviour. Surmise and romance go together, putting fascination in the place of knowledge. In Edith Wharton’s novel The House ...”

“... from one or both of his ladies. His troubles were real enough, and so was his father, a grim butler and ex-Guardsman known as ‘the colonel’, of whom Barker in his youth had been mortally afraid. Eliot, the kind evasive man with one big trouble, had more inspiration from it than Barker could get from all his many troubles, which from poetry’s point ...”

“... In a 1952 essay for the Venice Biennale on the forged metal sculptures of Chadwick, Armitage and Butler, Herbert Read wrote that they displayed the ‘geometry of fear’ and found allusions to snares, teeth and claws. In the wake of the atom bomb and revelations about the concentration camps, Read’s description helped to determine an angst-filled ...”

“... hard for most Parisians, but Ayer lived in Guy de Rothschild’s house in Paris, supported by a butler, a cook and a good cellar. When this arduous postwar service was over he returned to Oxford, at a time when philosophy in Oxford had yet to become Oxford philosophy and, in his view (Ryle, perhaps, apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real ...”

“... babies was to go away and put up in a hotel where he could write in peace. Many novelists, like Anthony Powell, found that they could not get down to work while hostilities were in progress. Not so Waugh, for whom hostilities were natural. In the beginning of the war he made time to write Put out more flags, one of his funniest books. By the end he had ...”

“... alcoholic) until his death in December 1985. She hardly left the house after this – according to Anthony Thwaite, who edited this collection – and died in February 2001. These letters are very different from those collected in the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-85. Those were spirited, eloquent, witty (anyone who met Larkin would have been struck ...”