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“... Britain’s application for entry to the Common Market as soon as he was in Downing Street, Heath took eighteen months to negotiate terms that were satisfactory to him and to Pompidou, a period probably extended by the need for Ireland and Denmark to do the same (Norway having opted out). The arithmetic in the Commons was not unfavourable. The Tories had 330 ...”

“... which drew its citizens from every civilised country, used French as its literary écu – and took Holland, land of tolerance and good publishers, as its capital. Within this efficient and cosmopolitan country of the mind, communications were remarkably good. The stock of a young author from a small provincial town in Brandenburg or Zeeland, once he ...”

“... Aller, the brilliant scholar of China who was one of the chief ornaments of that address, later took his despair and disillusion to the length of self-slaughter. Most were more sanguine. I don’t especially remember Bill Clinton, perhaps because he was one of the more moderate and conciliatory types. But I remember several of his girlfriends and I remember ...”

“... came across: much of Hunky Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on ...”

“... scheme is that greyish green one was first conscious of 40 years ago when Canonbury and Islington took it up and then the National Trust: ‘tasteful green’ it might be called (it’s the colour of the coalhouse door in Yorkshire). It’s a definite spread – shop, restaurant, a cloister cum herb garden, together with barns, farm buildings and, one ...”

“... the ostentatious solemnity one finds in the liturgical minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. The Messiaen ‘cathedral’, if not exactly ecumenical, is vast, with plenty of room in the nave – as Edward Said noted – for ‘staunch secularists like myself’. The sixth movement of Vingt Regards, a turbulent fugue, is called ‘Par Lui ...”

“... immigration into this country in the Fifties and Sixties drove him into paroxysms of fury. He took the side of the Arabs in the Middle East for the only reason which has never been justified: their antagonists were Jews. He believed that the postwar Tory Party was riddled with treacherous moderates, crypto-Communists and homosexuals. He spent many years ...”

“... and devoted to his two daughters, he alienated wife and children by an air of cold hostility. He took his current work in progress with him on holidays and brooded about it while drinking heavily, and the ‘new start’ to his marriage envisaged when he became a freelance writer, was abandoned within weeks. The new start involved stopping work at ...”

“... hundred years old.’ The college plumbing was also pretty ancient. Ved shivered in his room but took comfort in the knowledge that Harold Macmillan had shivered there before him. (One day Macmillan dropped into his old quarters and found Mehta stretched out on a sofa. ‘He must think that the college has gone to the dogs.’) Would Ved’s co-students also ...”

“... serious big time. And that image seemed to be confirmed, in the mid-Sixties, when Chelsea players took to hanging out in the King’s Road boutiques and hostelries of Swinging London. Chelsea’s team of that decade – the team of Venables, Tambling, Bridges and so on – was often wonderful to watch, but you could see what was meant when people sneered at ...”

“... in the world when it was wrecked in the late 16th century. The ship gave its name to Port Saint John, where it is believed to have sunk on its return from Cochin China, with a cargo of spices and china, but my friend has been picking up a quantity of cannonshot as well as pieces of willow pattern-like china. Drilling down into the sandbank at the edge of ...”

“... the water’ had never heard of it. Those who wanted to see it for themselves mostly took the steamer from Liverpool. The crossing is notoriously rough and lasts 11 hours, which half the boat spend knocking it back and the other half throwing it up. This leaves Belfast facing a deficit of good will and may be one reason why the city has never ...”

“... practitioners, with his own assistants, and not least with his own even more eminent brother, John. Hunter proffered a sinister materialistic explanation for the anatomists’ psychic violence: ‘the passive submission of dead bodies, their common objects, may render them less able to bear contradiction.’ No finer case exists of just that psychological ...”

“... In 1507 Damian, Abbot of Tungland – variously known as ‘the Italian’ or ‘Master John, the French leech’ – undertook to fly from Scotland to France. ‘To that effect he had a pair of wings made from feathers. When they were fastened to him, he flew from the castle walls of Stirling, but at once fell to the ground and broke his ...”

“... and what isn’t, the Council’s main concern is of course with cash. Out of office, Norman St John-Stevas would say that government provision for the arts was wholly inadequate: in office, he reduced that provision. Lord Gowrie, better attuned to his party’s mood, was so far from thinking the grant inadequate that he cut it again and encouraged the ...”