“... You’d never guess from the Noble-Hogg emphasis that this poet’s favourite novel was Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling. Mackenzie is one of Noble and Hogg’s many bêtes noires. He’s the comfortable, patronising establishment lawyer who pats Burns on the head, then scorns the drunken helot bard. Yet, emerging in part from Adam Smith’s ...”

“... response was ‘Now, jump out with me, Ba!’ And of course, miraculously, she did. J. Hillis Miller plausibly speculated that part of the fascination of Miss Barrett was her very inaccessibility, ‘immured in darkness and jealously guarded’: in Browning’s imagination her liberation assumed an operatic immensity, like the prisoners blinking into the ...”

“... and friendly with the Nicholsons.28 March, Palm Sunday. Remember this a propos a joke of Jonathan Miller’s, who, seeing a woman coming back from church holding a cross made of reeds said that it was literally the last straw.1 April. There is currently a row going on about late night raves on Primrose Hill where, lacking toilet facilities on the ...”

“... at last arrived. Not particularly memorable, one church does have a noteworthy memorial:Richard Henry Burden Cattell M.A.Rector of the Warhams 1928-1947Captain of the English Rugby Football team 1900Chaplain to the Forces at Gallipoli 1915.This tablet is placed here in remembrance by his seven daughters.It’s a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett.6 August. All ...”

“... used, possibly for the last time, to sign the deed of surrender handing the abbey over to Henry VIII’s commissioners. Over at Rievaulx we film in the rain and in the cavernous latrine below the monks’ dormitory. With a lighting cameraman this would have taken most of the day, but brought up in the brisker school of music video Ben Taylor, who ...”

“... Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the ...”

“... he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in 1949, he described the arrival of Auden on Ischia as having ‘thrown something of a gloom’ over the island (‘Such a tiresome old Aunty’). Before the month ...”

“... branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally produced.’ As are, presumably, its pesticide residues. When I ask why the flour could not be locally produced and nevertheless be organic she cannot explain. Money is, I imagine, the short answer ...”

“... he had never seen a professional production. He had read no dramatic literature: no Williams, Miller, O’Neill, Chekhov, Ibsen. It was only when he moved with his white soon to be second wife, Judy Oliver, to her home town of St Paul in 1978 that his interest in playwrighting began in earnest. He wrote children’s plays on science-related subjects for ...”

“... Street, paying half in cash.Warhol made it clear that ‘he did not want to be known as the I. Miller show guy.’ But his work as an artist did not have the same success as his commercial work. In the early 1950s he showed some of his homoerotic work at the Tanager Gallery, a trendy co-op space, though it was decided that his pictures ‘weren’t ...”

“... bring in cheap immigrant labour under ‘ironclad’ contracts. An English Temperance leader, Lady Henry Somerset, was pleasantly surprised by the elegance of the female strikers. The alliance between these Haverhill women and upper-class female reformers in Boston was crucial for the success of the mainly male strikers. Respectable voices chorused in their ...”

“... and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of midnight ...”

“... Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began taking classes with Allan Miller, a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She auditioned for Strasberg’s Actors Studio aged sixteen, and though she didn’t get in they encouraged her to try again later; piqued, she never did. When she left school in January 1960, she had her first role ...”

“... Street, in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got to know Francis when he designed some furniture for my Eccleston Street flat. I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it … In ...”

“... out once again for Manila. On the ship he met Jean Faircloth, the daughter of a Tennessee flour miller, 20 years younger than himself. They were married soon after his arrival, and ten months later had a son, Arthur. In public MacArthur called his wife ‘Madame’; she called him ‘Gen’ral’ or ‘Sir Boss’. He had found a compromise between ...”