“... and prayers of friars. In ‘Dymchurch Flit’, one of the stories in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, the fairies are said to have left the country by crossing the Channel in a boat, because of the threat posed to them by the Reformation: ‘Fair or foul, we must flit out o’ this, for Merry England’s done with, an’ we’re reckoned among the ...”

“... those works which become an old favourite while still brand new. And finally, America adored him. Geoffrey Grigson, an early supporter and subsequently an astringent critic, thought Thomas appealed especially to ‘persons of a kind needing shots of the notion of art as others need shots of insulin, of a kind put on heat by the slightest contact with artists ...”

“... to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups being told stories and at every table children reading on their ...”

“... living in Belfast. Longley continued to regard the book (alongside Ted Hughes’s Lupercal and Geoffrey Hill’s first collection, For the Unfallen) as a milestone, and he remembered his response: ‘A tradition that’s still throwing up poets like Larkin, Hill and Hughes must be doing all right.’There are traces ...”

“... crossbar of a bike. I’ve never seen this before and find it cheering. 1 October. I am reading Geoffrey Moorhouse’s book on the Pilgrimage of Grace and have reached the point in October 1536 when Robert Aske and the huge rebel host are at Doncaster waiting to move south, virtually unopposed. It’s a campaign that would surely have changed the course of ...”

“... and some of the others. Yet people knew. The Times obituary of McCulloch was written by the poet Geoffrey Dearmer. ‘Children of all ages were always comfortable in his unseen company,’ Dearmer wrote. ‘There was something of Larry the Lamb in him, and Larry could get away with murder.’ One of the qualities that made the journey from radio to ...”

“... a chimney-sweep or a coalman rampaged through our spotless house. I look up chimney-sweeps in Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora (shamefully out of print) and find that, the flowers being black and dusty, chimney-sweep and chimney-sweeper are Warwickshire slang for the plantain, particularly the ribwort, and that these were used to bind up ...”

“... your life picked over, but having it picked over by sneering toffs is very grim indeed. Paul Hill and Gerry Conlon have separately told me the same story of how, during their trial for the Guildford bombings, they used to stare at Sir Michael Havers QC, their prosecutor and chief tormentor. Havers had a nervous twitch and when the defendants succeeded in ...”

“... Details had emerged of an undeclared £373,000 loan Mandelson had taken from the Treasury minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house in Notting Hill, an untenable conflict of interest. Mandelson quit, and after a sojourn on Corfu with his ‘old and good friends’ from the Rothschild banking family, passed into his personal ...”

“... to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows. Umbrella rolled, vowels clipped, he sleepwalks through a gone-in-the-mouth city, struggling to make conversation with marooned vagrants and fire-eyed witnesses. The Gainsborough film studios, where Mason established ...”