“... in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these ...”

“... his various capacities as think-tank director, Daily Telegraph leader-writer and speechwriter for Michael Howard, he has been agitating against the United Kingdom’s membership of the EU throughout the 25 years since he was a student politician at Oxford. As an MEP he helped persuade David Cameron to withdraw the Tories from the conservative-liberal ...”

“... By 1987, with Militant and the miners beaten from the Mersey to the Humber, Thatcher’s ally Lord Young could afford to be more direct: ‘the two present growth industries – the City and tourism – are concentrated in the South. It’s our turn, that’s all.’Musgrove’s survey The North of England, published three years later, gave a sweeping and ...”

“... thousand articles. Williams was, indeed, a quite compulsive writer, almost a chronic writer. As a young working-class scholarship boy up at Cambridge, he seems to have decided, like not a few Welshmen before and after him, that the way to storm this alien citadel was to overwhelm it with a tide of wordy socialism. As an undergraduate Communist, he wrote his ...”

“... municipal scallywags like Derek Hatton. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll are all very well for the young, but the real pleasure of middle age is schadenfreude. Sometimes, when one looks back at the long line of Thatcher’s villains, one has to concede that, however much one disliked Thatcher’s triumphalism at the time, one could hardly wish the battle to ...”

“... own mother had taken food to her Menshevik sisters in a Tsarist jail), many young Jews were traumatised by the fact that the pogroms had begun again – in Germany of all places – and saw the CP as the natural leader of the anti-Fascist struggle. Inside the CP Rowley mingled with figures such as Hilda Bernstein (‘the best speaker we ...”

“... would conflate the industrial grime of Stockport with the sea breezes of genteel Southport, where young Alan was actually brought up. Grandfather Taylor had made his money in the cotton trade – he claimed to be a millionaire – and Alan’s father Percy worked in the family business, lighting his first havana as he was borne daily by train to his office in ...”

“... it was entirely in character that on her husband’s becoming Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George she adopted the style of an (honorary) knight’s wife, though she had no right to it – was not wise in the management of a tough little boy and systematically denied him any display of love at all. Her own fortunes in love had been ...”

“... good way. A single mother, she had to give up her bookkeeping job so she could look after her two young daughters. Now she has a small flower-selling business she can run largely from home. Her little bungalow at the end of Sheepshead Bay has flowers everywhere: lilies in the bath, roses in the kitchen sink, hyacinths in pots and pans. It’s a surprisingly ...”

“... early, so that by 12.45 I’m back home. It’s a model service, today’s radiographer a bearded young man who asks about Allelujah!, and shows me the screen and how he measures the width of my (quite small) aneurysms. Good young medics always cheer me and offer hope, not for my future but for the world in general.19 ...”

“... descendant of the parrot given to Shakespeare in 1610 as a gift by his friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton. The Bard was exceedingly fond of the bird, and would speak to her as one might write in a journal – to chronicle, reflect and confess. When he died of fever six years later, Anne Hathaway kept the parrot, and introduced into its cage a younger ...”

“... appreciation of the art of our time than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on ...”

“... in great houses ... and his assumption into a kind of artistic establishment in England.’ The young Yeats had known John O’Leary, who despite his long political exile remained a representative of ‘a free-thinking Catholic intelligentsia’ capable of dialogue with those ‘few educated men’ of the Protestant Ascendancy. But the decline of Ascendancy ...”

“... the fascinating and secretive British-American Project for a Successor Generation, which instructs young and friendly natives, who look likely to climb the provincial ladder of power, on the advantages of following the American way. Do you begin to see the outline of a political class? A bickering and faintly risible élite, whose ranks are filled with old ...”

“... had ceased for ever. In the days before Hollywood sequels Jane Austen enthralled her young relations by telling them what every reader wants to know: what happens after the book’s last page, or play’s last scene? It’s unusual to have so close a glimpse of the offstage author spinning consequences (and since Austen was only entertaining her ...”