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“... When I hear talk, as I have done recently, of another review of the Diplomatic Service, nothing occurs to me. This paralysis is induced by a premonition of intolerable tedium. Such a review, I suspect, would be a replay of what happened a decade ago in the Think Tank review: an exercise in evasion designed to conceal more than to illuminate Britain’s real problems ...”

“... One of the more dismal scenes in English literature comes in Gissing’s Henry Rycroft (itself a pretty depressing book), where a labourer on a spree is driven out of a restaurant because he is intimidated by the formalities which go with the food. He ends by wrapping the lot in a newspaper and bolting. Bevin completely lacked class-consciousness – in the crabbed sense of the term, though he took a natural pride in his humble origins ...”

“... off. None the less, each one has the answers. Of the two, the politician’s is by far the better. Walden’s one idea is that Britain has a segregated school system which nobody, for their own disreputable reasons, will talk about – except George Walden, who for the last year or two has talked about nothing ...”

“... Cold War would enable Western countries to reduce their defence efforts drastically. Tories like George Walden, in a celebrated speech to Chatham House (published in the London Review of Books), suggested that Britain’s international position had been ‘artificially inflated’ by the Cold War and that Britain would ‘be forced to spend less time ...”

“... system, modest in all except their cultural ambitions, readers of, say, the New Statesman and George Eliot, who craved philosophy. Furthermore the media were willing to recognise their existence. In 1951 Stuart Hampshire produced a small book on Spinoza. Spinoza was, through his associations with 19th-century dissent, the philosopher designed to appeal to ...”

“... become, like sport, a specialised affair, and Burgess himself is taken seriously along with it. George Walden, chairman of this year’s Booker Prize, quoted Burgess as a contemporary sage, whose dictum on what a good novel should be like was given as a guideline to his judging panel. Such a novel should leave in the mind ‘a sort of philosophical ...”

“... out wherever you want.’ I thought about one day when, trying to get to Sunday in the Park with George in Chicago, we came across throngs of people and David had a panic attack. ‘Close your eyes and hold my hand,’ I told him, as I led him through the crowd. Sometimes, in those early after-death days, he appeared alive in my dreams, but very thin, and I ...”

“... throws books at unsuspecting children; and, most disturbingly, the weeping ghost in the Saffron Walden house she shares with her mother and sister in early adulthood. This ghost’s presence is powerful: the cat seems to stare and hiss at it and when Weldon is alone with her baby one night, it so terrifies her that she is unable to leave the bedroom to get ...”

“... the Admiralty) aims to ‘bring Russia on a plate’ to the Allies. To this end he has the Earl of Walden treat with the visiting Prince Orlov about negotiable bits of the Balkans. Russian anarchists dispatch Feliks Kschessinsky (mercifully called Feliks throughout) to assassinate Orlov. As usual in Follett’s fiction, the struggle resolves itself into a ...”

“... Dukakis and Paul Tsongas. Romney lived in a mansion in Belmont, a town between Cambridge and Walden Pond with nothing but mansions; in the era of NWA I recall another boy being teased for being ‘straight outta Belmont’. In our imaginations, it was the softest, whitest, richest place in the world, and a Belmont leveraged-buyout artist was easy to vote ...”

“... Boucher tapestries, the 15th-century Ellesmere Chaucer, the autograph manuscript of Thoreau’s Walden, and documents and letters belonging to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln. The German botanist William Hertrich was commissioned to design the gardens: Californian, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, Jungle, Palm, Rose and Desert; a maze of ...”

“... survived the death of Puritanism. Carrying along nationalist historians like the Jacksonian George Bancroft, American Renaissance writers such as Hawthorne and Melville, and political leaders like Lincoln, the sacralisation of the United States created ‘the single most cohesive culture in the modern world’. Americans share not a common middle-class ...”

“... the citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are fatally trapped. George Walden’s Tory Reform Group pamphlet of 1990, ‘Blocked Society’ – blocked by the ‘national vice of deference to irrational institutions, obsolete political structures and absurdist conventions’ – could have been unblocked at long ...”

“... be exempted from royal pardon. When introducing the bill that became the Act of Oblivion, General George Monck, who had served as Cromwell’s military commander in Scotland, proposed only five men. In the end, Parliament agreed on more than a hundred. Some were already dead, some had surrendered and others, including Whalley and Goffe, were on the run.To ...”

“... let me in without a ticket once the first race was underway. Ancient names such as Lord Howard de Walden, exotic ones such as the Aga Khan, captured my imagination, which had previously been engrossed by Sir Reginald de Cobham, whose effigy, with its helm and Saracen’s head, scarred with venerable graffiti, lay in Lingfield parish church and whose name ...”