“... Observer on the Sunday. Just over a year ago a previous diary of mine had this to say about the young English player Paul Gascoigne, allegedly wayward but already deeply acceptable to the crowd: ‘Bobby Robson’s team had hardly left the field, after the recent defeat of Albania at Wembley, when he was disparaging the contribution of Paul Gascoigne, who ...”

“... the story goes) she didn’t have what it took for big-time political life. He then married a young merchant banker who quit her job for the campaign; nasty people have been calling her the wife from Central Casting. Their launch was a thoroughly repellent occasion: on stage at the Wesley Mission they wheeled in a parade of avowedly Ordinary Australians ...”

“... see the significance of the huge amount of native activity, for which the evidence is assembled in Roger Fiske’s excellent English Theatre Music in the 18th Century (1973). One reason for the failure of Italian opera in London was doubtless that it came too late. In the 1720s the orderly, poetic Metastasian opera was becoming the rage throughout Italy, led ...”

“... The death of Alexander III in 1286 without surviving issue and the subsequent death in 1290 of his young granddaughter, Margaret, Maid of Norway, while she was being brought to Scotland, left no clear heir and the kingdom plummeted into political turmoil. The main competitors for the throne in the ensuing Great Cause (overseen by Edward I of England) were soon ...”

“... on Picasso’s goings-on, a Saint-Simon at the court of Picasso. Penrose set off in 1922 on Roger Fry’s advice, to study art with André Lhote, and fell in love with Paris, with French art and with the poet Valentine Boué, whom he met in Cassis. He had a villa there from 1923, set up a studio with Yanko Varda, and became close friends with Duncan ...”

“... Garner has shown an aversion to setting the scene, but in this case it may be a shrewd move. Young readers can impose their own preference, or let the protagonists be the same age without the technicality of twinhood. It’s revealed late in the book that Colin is the taller by an inch, which could mean anything. There’s the merest whisper of rivalry ...”

“... Soon after they have ensnared their young victims, the Moonies brainwash them, I am told, into hating their parents and families. Other Californian cults may do the same. The British Conservative Party is a long way from California, and it is still some way from being a cult: yet in recent years odd things have been happening to the Conservative Party ...”

“... clergyman, he was indoctrinated in childhood in the crudest form of Evangelical belief. As a young don at Oxford, he came under the influence of Newman, and all but went over to Rome; but at the last moment he recoiled, reacting so violently in the opposite direction that, though he was a clergyman and became the head of his college, he virtually lost ...”

“... a budget of £106 million in 2019; its car was the slowest on the grid by far. Most drivers start young, racing in go-karts from the age of five or six and moving up through Formulas 4, 3 and 2 before, if they’re lucky, getting a seat in an F1 car. It can cost £50,000 a year to compete on the karting circuit and £500,000 to race a season in Formula ...”

“... different reasons. For one thing, the Society recruited an extraordinary group of highly talented young men, perhaps peaking between 1890 and 1914, and it is impossible not to be interested in what Russell, Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore made of each other. For another thing, some of them had an extraordinary impact on the ...”

“... themes in the Queen’s Robing Room in the new Houses of Parliament. A decade later, a coterie of young, untried artists including Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris set out to adorn the walls of the Oxford Union with similar subjects. But neither Dyce nor the high-spirited youths were qualified to paint in fresco, and the Oxford pictures decayed and ...”

“... not least as a way of explaining the fall of the ‘Red Wall’ nearly twenty years later. As a young man in the mid-1970s, Makin-Waite became involved in a campaign against two councillors from the National Party (an offshoot of the National Front) who had been elected in Blackburn, like its neighbour Burnley a former cotton town. He became ‘a serial ...”

“... a mesmerist, who claims he can help her, and seems to do so with the assistance of a medium, a young woman who turns out to be … her lost sister! The confusing difference in their appearance – Catherine’s extremely large feet – is accounted for by her tightrope-walking career. When the Baron discovers Gertie is about to inherit a large fortune he ...”

“... Russian writing failed to move with the times. I have seen Bulgakov described by his translator Roger Cockrell as a ‘Russian writer trapped in Soviet space’. Paustovsky seems not even to have been trapped. He is squarely of the 19th century, a Turgenevian or Chekhovian throwback.Chekhov, almost invariably, and not wrongly, is the point de repère for ...”

“... informative note, a detail of local colour which makes the opening action almost unintelligible. Young Elliott first makes friends with the Extra-Terrestrial, and revives him from incipient exhaustion, by laying a trail of ‘M&Ms’ from the forest to the backyard. ‘The great M&Ms have given me my vitality back,’ comments E.T., in interior ...”