“... condemned as snobby and fossilised, and if some dons defended the students – Leach, Raymond Williams, for a time John Vincent – others more than lived up to their critics’ jaundiced views. Kidd describes John Sparrow, warden of All Souls, as ‘an indefatigable public antagonist of student protest … immature, childishly selfish, with a juvenile ...”

“... is missing, but anxious that people should not suspect that it is his integrity. The career of Richard Crossman refuted these stereotypes rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached ...”

“... to return the books, but suggested he might want to read them first.Through Hughes, Ellison met Richard Wright, who had moved to New York from Chicago to edit New Challenge and help out in the Harlem bureau of the Daily Worker. Wright commissioned a book review from Ellison, and then a short story. He also encouraged Ellison’s interest in radical ...”

“... CIA was a Soviet spy. After such sleuthing it is a relief to find in this book of essays edited by Richard Langhorne an article on the Cambridge spies by a don, and it is by far the most sensible account so far written. It is the best because Christopher Andrew is a historian at Corpus Christi, Cambridge who has become the leading authority on the Intelligence ...”

“... with dusters. I don’t mean I want to play Burt Reynolds parts, only somewhere between him and Richard Wattis, say – those are the parameters.’She was a great woman, her performance of ‘Let’s Do It’ at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in ...”

“... in the middle of a field.20 January. Collected by the New Yorker and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde ...”

“... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...”

“... a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the impossible last day of my classes. No news.’ In late 1959, waiting for short story acceptances that would not come, she wrote in her journal: ‘Must not wait for mail as it ruins the day.’ Then the ...”

“... reliance on taste or memory’, as he would later explain to the poet Jackson Mac Low. His piece Williams Mix (1953), intricately spliced together from six hundred sections of pre-recorded electromagnetic tape, and his solo piano work, Music of Changes (1951), were assembled using instructions divined from the I Ching. But by the time an audience heard them ...”

“... century. It is not true that no statutes were passed in 1621, and the careers of Abbot and Williams illustrate that the bishops were not ‘a solid block of royal supporters’ in the Lords. At times, the link between evidence and statement is less tight than one might wish. Motives are imputed with some freedom, and the number of adjectives is ...”

“... in Paternoster Square. One by one or in neatly opposed couples – Ken Clarke and Shirley Williams, say – funeral attendees were interrogated about the legacy. Rarely can such an Alice in Wonderland charivari of local stereotypes have been assembled, some of them (like Dave and Samantha Cameron) quite obviously having a good time, with smiles and ...”

“... partner of Amelia Earhart, who doted on young Gore), his serio-comic encounters with Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt and Orson Welles, and his holidays in the sinister sunlight of Hollywood as a hired hand (there’s still controversy about how much homoeroticism he snuck into the screenplay of Ben-Hur – ‘I suspect that Heston does not know to ...”

“... and the movements that were to emerge out of the late 1960s, or connect the thinking of Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall et al with other strains of thought that also challenged the accepted borders between the political and the personal. So, while Sandbrook has considerable fun with the chaotic Albert Hall poetry festival of June 1965 (the ...”

“... landscape. Far from offering the viewpoint of someone who was a ‘peasant himself’, as Raymond Williams has argued, Hardy saw the countryside from the vantage-point of a grammar-school educated, professionally-trained and socially-estranged intellectual writing for a London audience. Snell’s reading of Hardy is a salutary reminder of the realities of ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”