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“... Only one of these five memoirs can be fairly called secular – quite unconcerned with the consolations of religion, untroubled by the complications. This is From Early Life by the oldest of the five authors, the novelist and scientist ‘William Cooper’: he was born in 1910 and brought up (as Harry Hoff) in the town of Crewe in Cheshire. Seniors in his family were determined chapel-goers, but Cooper-Hoff looks back at his childhood, over eighty years, with the quiet smile of a tolerant agnostic: his light, amused impressions illustrate the way England has become more secular than other nations, during this century ...”

“... for the answer. But the answer, of course, was there all along: more thought. More argument. For Blair to deny that the invasion of Iraq influenced the bombers is an insult to both language and morality. For Islamic extremists to pretend that their cause will not be set back in Britain by targeting buses and tubes is a murderous delusion. ...”

“... his colleagues and published in the Lancet last November, has come in for similar criticism. Tony Blair prefers figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health showing that 3853 civilians were killed between April and October 2004, and his government refers with statistical approval to the Iraqi Body Count Database, which reports 16,352 civilian deaths by 1 ...”

“... found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered. She was staying with her ...”

“... was born in 1900, when Victoria was still queen, and he died little more than a month before Tony Blair became prime minister. Pritchett’s family bumped along on that uneasy late Victorian border between the respectable artisans and the aspiring lower middle class. His father, a man with a limitless capacity for financial disaster, belonged to the Wellsian ...”

“... and social thinker, is now likely to find many sympathisers. One of them used to be Tony Blair, who thought well of The Rise of the Meritocracy, while misreading it. He was all for the meritocracy, and the author was not. Current themes and anxieties were in ample evidence in 1957-59. The two main parties were already at blows over Keynesian public ...”

“... a small corner of Wiltshire life, into a late 18th-century space imbued with the spirit of Cowper, Dorothy Wordsworth, Gilbert White. A Way in the World, despite its wide historical sweep, captures a less elegiac mood, and with its political concerns, put me in mind of Hobbes. I also kept thinking of Raleigh, and his short poem ‘What is our Life’: What is ...”

“... Zuckerman a decade earlier. In New York, Peyton writes, he fell in with the Gershwins. He met Dorothy Parker and got to know Tallulah Bankhead well enough to pick up the friendship again in London. During the Blitz, in between mapping the impact of bombs, he dined at the Savoy with Alfred Hitchcock. That friendship, too, continued for a lifetime. As a ...”

“... his father, Philip Gray, a violent man who seems regularly to have beaten Gray’s beloved mother, Dorothy. Ugolino is found in hell gnawing on the skull of his enemy Ruggieri, so Mack wonders whether ‘Gray was inflicting within his mind a suitable vengeance on the emotional cannibalism in which he felt his own father had participated’. Because Ugolino’s ...”

“... fifth entry of the list in the back of his copy of Man’s Hope? Was it Mary Hay the actress? Mary Blair who married Wilson? Mary Armstrong who married Ben Hecht, who wrote a book about the screenwriter Charlie MacArthur, who almost made a mother of Dorothy Parker, who wrote a poem about Fitzgerald and fell a little in love ...”

“... as Keir Starmer put it at this year’s Labour Party Conference, in a deliberate echo of Tony Blair. But then, out comes the nanny state to tell people off for claiming benefits and/or daring to go on strike. Belts must be tightened, ‘in the interests of the nation’, which somehow look much like the interests of capital. And Labour also tends to other ...”

“... can be blamed is his underestimating the stupidity of the nation and its press. It’s proof, as Dorothy Wellesley wrote, that as ‘foreigners, especially the French, tell us, we have never acquired the adult mind.’ 18 February. Ned Sherrin’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. A friendly service interspersed with songs, some from ...”