“... one wouldn’t, of course. The terms Hillier chooses to describe Betjeman’s relationships are nice little phrases like ‘smitten’, or ‘fell in love with’, which is all very fine and noble – admirable even – except perhaps in the case of Betjeman’s relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, a woman with whom he shared much of his later life, and ...”

“... and guide is William Seward, his secretary of state, played with all kinds of grace and irony by David Strathairn; and in the House his opponent and ultimate ally is Thaddeus Stevens, a witty and domineering abolitionist, represented by an extraordinary black wig that has Tommy Lee Jones underneath it. Jones gets craggier with every film he is in, his ...”

“... resist all efforts to gain him recognition. According to Lebowitz, ‘Peter was incapable of being nice to anyone who could do him any good.’He didn’t publish another monograph after Portraits in Life and Death; at the Jeu de Paume, the few books shown alongside his prints are mostly posthumous catalogues. Around the end of 1980, Hujar met a young ...”

“... always described in terms of ‘our boys out there’, sons, lads, children, a poor, beleaguered David. That’s us, the eternal victims. And the enemy is always Goliath, even the children who defied the IDF in Rafah three days ago and therefore had to die while demonstrating, empty-handed, in solidarity with the thousands whom the benevolent military had ...”

“... ran a tapestry-repair company. The cannibal daughter worked there too. No account of the sculptor David Smith fails to notice his time as a welder on a production line; Bourgeois’s stitching should be thought of in the same way. A skill already learned, waiting to give a flavour of unusual competence to quite different constructions. When, in Seven in a ...”

“... thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing ...”

“... that Dickens was then busy launching; one thanked a Sheffield firm (innocently mentioned in David Copperfield) for the gift of a set of knives; another attempted to patch up his lapsed friendship with George Cruikshank, who had probably been offended by Dickens’s attacks on his temperance pamphlets; another was a long, newsy report to a Swiss friend ...”

“... David Mitchell’s first book, Ghostwritten (1999), which describes itself as ‘a novel in nine parts’, is a collection of loosely interconnected stories. The protagonist of one will have a walk-on role in the next; a minor character from someone else’s story will later reappear as the narrator of their own. The first narrator is a member of a Japanese doomsday cult, the perpetrator of a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway, now on the run in Okinawa ...”

“... signalled by a chunky scarlet arrow, and accompanied by a caption such as ‘Cutting the grass at David Davis’s home is very expensive.’ The newly demotic Telegraph has exposed a lot of predictable wangles and fiddles, along with a very few cases of prima facie fraud, which may or may not stand the test of criminal prosecution. But it has used a brush so ...”

“... What have Margaret Thatcher and David Steel in common, apart from holding the leadership of their respective political parties? Both are highly intelligent and educated persons with academic qualifications – Thatcher in chemistry and law, Steel in arts and law. Both have been called to the bar, and for both politics has been the main preoccupation of their adult lives ...”

“... strange figure, cuddly-English on the outside – born 1969 in London; Dulwich College and Oxford; nice shirts and tweedy jackets – but on the inside a roiling maelstrom of the darkest avant-gardism, both of the old-skool European variety (the Futurists are often mentioned, and Robbe-Grillet, and Bataille, and Blanchot), and more recent, less canonical ...”

“... I was ushered in to Colonel Klindt’s office. ‘I have come to request a visit to my husband, David Kitson,’ I said. ‘No visits for Kitson.’ He did not even look up. ‘Look –’ ‘It’s no good being difficult, lady,’ he said. ‘No visits for Kitson and that’s it. If you want to apply again tomorrow, well, that’s your affair. You can ...”

“... Dewsbury Minster, a church founded in 627, when St Paulinus turned up, is workmanlike. There are nice bits, though. Even near the most troubled estates, there is green stuff. Even near Chickenley, where the 12-year-old girl tried to hang a five-year-old boy in a patch of woods. Many people in Dewsbury think the media overdid it. ‘The press wanted to make ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... Number Ten for all those years. Politics is supposed to be a rough game, Blair is supposed to be a nice guy, and in rough games nice guys are supposed to finish last. How then to account for his electoral success? His detractors will say that re-election under a set of rules that allowed him to retain a strong parliamentary ...”