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“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... all too close who also stages something in the nature of a magical disappearing act. Here is Richard Gere interviewed – although that is not quite the right word – by Cameron Docherty in the Independent last June:He is as elusive as smoke. Restless and edgy, he paces around the marble floor of his Malibu home wondering why people are always curious ...”

“... Pougy, who began a roman à clef, Idylle saphique, about an American woman called Flossie Temple Bradford. But when Barney returned to Paris, they got back together. Soon afterwards Barney met Renée Vivien, who wrote poetry and was known as ‘Sappho 1900’. Palmer, still on the scene – Barney’s lovers tended to remain on the scene, jostling or ...”

“... famous episode of Lewis’s life, especially as represented, and perhaps somewhat travestied, in Richard Attenborough’s 1993 film Shadowlands. In 1952 Lewis met and developed some form of relationship with (was single-mindedly pursued by?) a noisy, unhappily married, not very successful, American freelance writer 16 years younger than he was. In 1955 Joy ...”

“... and its author, and perhaps about the genre as a whole, turns out to be more complicated. Born in Bradford in 1894, Priestley, after extensive service in the First World War and three years at Cambridge, had embarked in the early 1920s on the precarious career of a man of letters, turning his hand to criticism, essays and novels, all written in haste, none ...”

“... accounting to do with the transfer of Royal Mail pension liabilities, state ownership of the Bradford and Bingley building society, and interest credit from the Bank of England’s quantitative easing scheme.1 All the tweaky accounting is in the government’s favour, obviously. (The Royal Mail transfer is a particular goody: the pension fund’s £28 ...”

“... left is reinforced in this perception by its reading of Labour history, most recently displayed in Richard Seymour’s Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, which holds that the will to win elections has often been a form of collusion in the perpetuation of the traditionalist British state.3 This history has its own familiar ...”

“... example, in his demonstration in the House of Commons after the assassination of the Rev. Robert Bradford and his subsequent call for a campaign of passive disobedience to force the British out. Of necessity, the leap of faith is informed or sustained by an idea of martyrdom. Paisley comments that Christ makes frequent references to his death as ‘the ...”

“... More generally, there is the literature on the corruption of the innocent which takes its cue from Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy and which is apt to picture every form of mass consumption as degenerate. Here – as in the writings of Jeremy Seabrook – it is the prosperity of the working class, rather than, or as well as, the poverty, which is the ...”

“... a monologue about a child molester, has him hearing the planes beginning their descent to Leeds Bradford Airport and imagining the seat-belt sign going on, the monologue (memorably done by David Haig) ending in a terrible wordless scream.21 May. Rupert, who is being taught sewing by his (professional) mother, makes me as an exercise a pillbox hat out of ...”

“... Peter Mandelson’s strangely off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise themselves as Islamic extremists). But almost the oddest response has been our terrified certainty that there remains a plentiful ...”

“... Four pages were attached to the letter, purporting to be instructions sent to a ‘brother’ in Bradford on how to infiltrate the governing bodies of state schools in Muslim areas, wearing down the head teacher until they ‘just give up’. The letter was well-informed about problems in several Birmingham schools going back to the 1990s, all of which, it ...”