“... the Independent by Charlotte Philby, Kim Philby’s granddaughter, prompted by the publication of Anthony Blunt’s apologia released by the British Library. Not surprisingly she draws an unfavourable comparison between Blunt and Philby, bolstered by happy family pictures of her grandfather in Moscow. There’s not much point, it seems to me, in apportioning ...”

“... those quotations from Defoe. For most of the past two hundred years, since the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, a serious financial authority (which Defoe was in his time) who suggested that credit markets were ruled basically by irrationality, whimsy and chaos would himself be regarded as suffering from ‘a sort of lunacy’. Yet the events ...”

“... he would remove it from its human context and display it like the movement of an animal in a zoo. Anthony Quayle’s Coriolanus reminded him of a young bull, Donald Wolfit’s Iachimo of ‘a vast, gloating reptile’, while to evoke Louise Brooks’s Lulu in Pabst’s silent film he summoned comparisons with a swan, a gazelle and a tropical fish. He could ...”

“... A Life (1989). To these I can now add some findings of my own. Sarah Walker was born on Great Smith Street, in Westminster, shortly before midnight on 11 November 1800. She was the second of six children – four girls, two boys – of Micaiah Walker, tailor, and his wife Martha, née Hilditch. The family was of Dorset origin: ...”

“... frailty en masse should somehow add up to strength. It begins in human weakness, and while – as Anthony Quinton observed – you don’t need to believe in original sin to make imperfection your starting point as a political theorist, it’s obviously a mighty metaphysical help. Hill’s belief in original sin was quite passionate: it was, he said on one ...”

“... he is known to have offered the ‘Roman murder story’ to a number of his friends (including Anthony Trollope and Tennyson) and the idea that he himself might make something of it seems to have come to him only after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861 and his return to England later the same year. The poem, whose roots go back to Browning’s ...”

“... Miesian case study-style house has now been demolished), Leo Rubinstein, Paul Tvrtkovic, Ray Smith and Ronald Coleman. Most of these were deadpan little houses, in brick with exposed concrete frames, often with small windows onto the street and much larger ones onto the gardens and courtyards.Clients included playwrights (Michael Frayn), pop stars ...”

“... home by Tube, whereas after the rigours of Nidderdale I feel I’m entitled to a cab. Still, as Anthony Powell used sometimes to note in his journal, ‘interesting day’. 7 July. The same week as I traipsed across North Yorkshire the Guardian has a piece by Terry Eagleton saying that of all the eminent writers and playwrights only Pinter continues radical ...”

“... of Never on Sunday and Psycho, in which, occupying a long floaty number, she prowls up to Anthony Perkins, perching beside him to croon. ‘What’s it about?’ he asks. ‘Like all Greek songs, about love and death,’ she replies. ‘I give you milk and honey and in return you give me poison.’ The museum was deserted. The entrance fee had ...”

“... on rather daringly slim evidence – that the thinkers who made Hume, Ferguson and Adam Smith possible were Scottish but ‘heretics’ to the Presbyterian mainstream: liberal Catholic exiles, Jacobites and Episcopalian intellectuals from Scotland’s north-east. This, and his irrepressible sneering at all things Caledonian, annoyed the Scots. It ...”

“... the Washington watchdog apparatus, it grew more exacting in its attentions. An FBI report on Mr Smith Goes to Washington now called it ‘decidedly Socialist in nature’, while It’s a Wonderful Life was ‘an obvious attempt to discredit bankers’. The first of the three invasions of Hollywood by HUAC came in 1947, the others in 1951 and 1953. On every ...”

“... his son’s early work, beginning with an oil ‘in the manner of Watteau’. In True Colours, Anthony Haden-Guest’s fascinating book on the inner workings of the art world, Koons is quoted as saying: ‘My father started selling my work for hundreds of dollars when I was nine years old. These horrendous paintings. This gave me a tremendous amount of ...”

“... about having to put on so much make-up and even more about the bore of taking it all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today showing me her grey mottled legs as if they are a newly completed landscape. She’s particularly pleased with the ulcers she has incorporated into the decorative scheme, displaying them with the ...”

“... York to an area even more remote than the one inhabited by his contemporary, the clergyman Sydney Smith, who complained that he was so remote from civilisation he was twenty miles from a lemon. An absence of lemons wouldn’t have bothered Stubbs, who shut himself up in a farmhouse at Hawkstow in North Lincolnshire, in what’s now Humberside, where he ...”

“... the son of the author of Wind in the Willows?A. A nickname: Mouse.Tell the Bede story to Maggie Smith, who recalls some lines she had to sing in revue:Oh, I am the Venerable BedeI can scarcely write and just about read.18 February. Listening to the last movement of Elgar’s First Symphony I’m put in mind of some huge submerged mass coming to the ...”