“... been set up to provide a richer diet of drama, music and variety than the staid and news-oriented Home Service. The first guest was Vic Oliver, a popular Austrian musical comedian. Plomley scripted the episode and the transcript survives. Talk was squeezed in round the edges of the records: a series of brief, knockabout, allegedly comic exchanges with ...”

“... and that each section undercuts the one before, with the last, ‘Eleven Addresses to the Lord’, revealing the wholly ironic import of the book’s title. Such bitter, self-directed ironies, conjured by a single section (if not line) of the best dream songs, are the most impressive feature of his work. Only Whitman and Pound (in his early ...”

“... whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires that man should live.’ While Eamon de Valera dreamed, Sean Lemass, increasingly pragmatic and impatient for power, was left in charge of Irish industry. In the Fifties, as de Valera clung to power, four out of ...”

“... threatened to cut passages from The Age of Innocence in 1920; but when the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal proposed cutting her autobiography by a fifth in 1933 – and reducing the Journal’s $25,000 fee accordingly – Wharton pronounced him ‘at liberty to cut out anything he wishes, but not of course to back out of his price.’ No doubt she was ...”

“... reality, as well as the splendour, of the emperor’s new clothes. For the handful of liberals – Lord Scarman, Anthony Lester, Michael Zander – who have been arguing for decades that we need to have our rights and the government’s powers written down and invigilated by independent judges, the Nineties are looking like the moment of truth. That they were ...”

“... regard Alan as her husband. His second marriage (to Eve Crosland, sister of Tony) meant a second home and a second family – but with Alan hopping between both. Just as, when he left Margaret to live with Eve, he had continued to spend part of each week with Margaret, so when he eventually left Eve in the late Sixties, he went back to Margaret but continued ...”

“... Service Order. This very high honour brought him, on recovery, appointment as a brigade major at home, and when the brigade moved to France, his efficiency won him promotion from that plum staff job to a succession of others. In 1918, he was chief of staff of a division and in 1919 a battalion commander and lieutenant-colonel. Good luck also then saw to it ...”

“... than amid our financial convulsions. Where would a character called Madoff have been more at home? Nonetheless, Shakespeare, the rival of whom Jonson wrote with magnanimous prescience that he was not of an age but for all time, has left him far behind. Only a few of Jonson’s plays, Volpone, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and perhaps Epicene, are ...”

“... the detention camps, controlled villages and courtrooms of Kenya were mostly hidden from people at home. They knew some of it – indeed, did what they could to put an end to it after the scandalous British beatings of detainees at Hola camp in 1959, which left 11 dead and 60 seriously wounded – but nothing like the whole. Alan Lennox-Boyd, colonial ...”

“... a Manhattan winter, ‘flu in my bones like a lantern’, sustained only by the thought that back home all is going on as always: the seas warm and the neighbours in the open together, ‘talking over palings’. But his opening Caribbean poem begins, disorientingly, with the ‘islands hissing in rain’, the intemperate weather symptomatic of a sea-change ...”

“... with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and with a measure of impartiality, reporting Lord Annan’s opinion that Leavis’s treatment was, in MacKillop’s paraphrase, ‘tough, but not unexpected or unjust’. Annan was Provost of King’s and knew the Cambridge system, if that is the word, intimately. But MacKillop also knows it, and, with his ...”

“... The media described it as a resounding popular triumph and crowed about ‘investiture fever’. Lord Snowdon devised special ‘tasteful’ souvenirs for the Event – Investiture pie-funnels and Investiture doilies. In a word, more lies, more kitsch. Nairn is, though, more interested in how the Crown has denatured Ukanian nationalism and national ...”

“... was nativism, which was accused of papering over such local abuses as slavery, genital mutilation, home-grown despotism and racism. ‘We don’t have any problems with the blacks,’ an Afrikaner said to me out of the blue as I was standing in line in a cafeteria in South Africa in 1991, ‘it’s they who have problems with each other.’ Whenever ...”

“... with a collapsed economy and a peculiarly debilitating colonial legacy dating back to 1885, when Lord Randolph Churchill, the secretary of state for India, dispatched an expeditionary force to sort out the ‘Burma problem’ of the day. When the Burma Expeditionary Force seized Mandalay, British policy-makers decided not only to dethrone the ...”

“... applied to Venus (and on occasion, Mercury). Belzebuth is better known as Beelzebub, the ‘Lord of the Flies’, which would appear to be an insulting mistranslation into Hebrew of the name of a Philistine god: the original ‘would have involved a form of Baal, a common title of Phoenician and Canaanite gods’. Stratton-Kent suggests a correspondence ...”