“... to have been kept for sport or warfare. The Kelsalls point out from the diary of a lesser laird, George Home of Kimmerghame, that the enthusiasm for gardening and for household tasks meant organising other people to do things: planting, pruning and protecting plants were all things for which orders were given. We are a long way before the ingrained dirty ...”

“... of ‘wits so exquisite and discriminating’ as Raymond Mortimer, Noël Coward and Desmond Shawe-Taylor; on the publication of a book of poems a flurry of plaudits – ‘grimly entertaining’, ‘brilliantly funny and intimate’ – is produced. Barbera and McBrien summarise and categorise her output according to theme; they treat her address to her ...”

“... security forces. Would they at last teach the cheeky croppies from Derry a lesson? Had not John Taylor, Northern Ireland’s Home Affairs Minister, declared, after the shooting of Cusack and Beattie: ‘I feel that it may be necessary to shoot even more in the forthcoming months’? Had not the newly-formed extremist Democratic Unionist Party announced on ...”

“... formaldehyde. But the career started in shoes. Warhol caused a bit of bother at college with some George Grosz-like drawings of little boys with their fingers stuck up their noses. Grosz’s notion of Dada – ‘the organised use of insanity to express contempt for a bankrupt world’ – was evidently Warhol’s for a minute or two, but the American boy was ...”

“... crisp blue skies crisscrossed with lines of puffy white; doctored gatherings of Barack Obama with George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jacob Rothschild, one of their arms stuck out at an unnatural angle to point a gun at the viewer; frowning women next to cell phones emitting harmful energies; the blurry Twin Towers in the moments before and after they were ...”

“... Wilson barely remains as polite as it was now good manners to be when discussing Eliot. In England George Orwell echoed Wilson’s opinion. That the illness of a generation was a suitable subject for poetry was not denied, but Eliot’s remedy seemed preposterous. Such rejections were of course more or less exactly what Eliot understood by heresy, and so ...”

“... on an episode from an 1880 novel, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, by the American author George Washington Cable. One central character is an enslaved prince, Koanga, who is killed after cursing his enslavers and attempting to escape from them. But Delius and his librettist, Charles Francis Keary, changed Cable’s original in crucial ways, altering ...”

“... idiom, live in a certain part of a town, or be called a nigger by someone’. And as Brandon Taylor points out in his foreword to the new edition of Erasure, the narrator, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, introduces himself first as ‘a writer of fiction … a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker’, and then again in collective or ...”

“... A grown man, now a great-grandfather, who watches YouTube videos where talking penises DEMOLISH Taylor Swift ‘whenever she manages to make it on the charts’. A wall of weird masculinity supplements behind him and a carnivore dog.You may want to lay off the coffee, we told him gently, when he described how his hands shook when he was trying to install ...”

“... Pursuit of Peace (1963), where his review from the English Historical Review demolishing A.J.P. Taylor’s egregious Origins of the Second World War was reprinted. That was a book which saddened many of those who respect Taylor as the greatest British maestro of the diplomatic and political history of the past hundred and ...”

“... twice a week and we generally went on a Monday and a Saturday. Comedies were best, particularly George Formby, but we took what was on offer, never knowing whether a film had any special merit. Some came with more of a reputation than others, Mrs Miniver for instance with Greer Garson, Dangerous Moonlight (with the Warsaw Concerto) and Now, Voyager with the ...”

“... in Family Values. That much was already obvious in the 1992 Presidential election. In fact George Bush was himself a perfect representative of the socially secure, socially tolerant, country-club Republicans who were most uncomfortable with the anti-abortion position imposed on candidate Bush. Those to whom the advocacy of Family Values appeals most ...”

“... was when I stayed to listen to the next lecture, ‘On Alleged Medical Negligence’, delivered by George Bonney, a laconic orthopaedic surgeon with long experience on the governing body of the Medical Defence Union. His tongue-in-cheek thesis was that the invention of penicillin had been a disaster for doctors, who until then had been unable to cure much ...”

“... and powerful Lord Channon has become! There is his house in Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself ...”

“... winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that ...”