“... Jew’ (I throw in a further story here, to the effect that at his funeral or synagogue memorial service an earwitness friend of mine heard two old Oxford panjandrums agree that the service had gone well – ‘but what was all that Jewish stuff about?’). Then again, there is the lecture at which a student is vexed to ...”

“... the quirky, oblique lyricism which has become his personal signature, he puts it here to the service of an idea, or complex of ideas, which constitutes a private poetry of departure. An ‘inner émigré’, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, he proposes for himself, for his father, for a childhood neighbour, real or imagined disappearing acts. This is, from ...”

“... By spring​ 1919, Robert Graves was a demobilised war veteran, a new father and the author of four volumes of poetry. At this moment came ‘the first poem I wrote as myself’, as his autobiography describes ‘Rocky Acres’. After surviving years of front-line bombardment, a shell splinter through his right lung and the postwar influenza epidemic, Graves had returned to his cottage in the Welsh hills ...”

“... MP for Morpeth, Will Owen, was charged with being an agent of the StB, Czechoslovakia’s secret service. The man who had named him was Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer organised by Robert Husak, another intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in ...”

“... forces of the recently deposed James II surrounded the largely Protestant city. Its governor, Robert Lundy, wanted to negotiate surrender as they didn’t have the resources to withstand a prolonged siege. But thirteen apprentice boys defied him and closed the gates. Lundy was banished, replaced by a stauncher man. The siege lasted 105 days. Derry’s ...”

“... He hunted down giants for Monitor – Henry Moore, Sir Thomas Beecham, E.M. Forster, Max Ernst, Robert Graves. He had the fine, if expensive idea of filming the artist or administrator in a setting germane to his or her work. They went to Athens to profile Katina Paxinou, to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to observe Rudolf Bing in the post that had been ...”

“... We may have forgotten the work of his youth, the two post-war novels based on his experience of service with the German Army in Russia. The 22 stories in The Casualty were written in the immediately post-war period, 1946 to 1952, so that they are ‘old’ stories, but satisfyingly youthful, physically aware of particulars, not seeking ...”

“... many of the traditionally opera-loving and highly opera-subsidising countries. The public library service, too, which has grown hugely since 1945, can claim a success in at least putting books within reach of the middle class. Before 1945, the middle class left the ‘free’ libraries to the proletariat, in the belief that one was likely to catch a ...”

“... with Irish-Americans pledged to the separation of Ireland from Britain. The Tory Government of Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, and its Irish administration under his nephew Chief Secretary A.J. Balfour – whose preferment had given rise to the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ – had thrown everything, including its Law Officers, and the resources of ...”

“... superhumanly competent and diligent, and it was no surprise when he passed top into the Civil Service after the war. In his attitude to the British people, he reminds me more of the Efficient Baxter vainly attempting to sort out Lord Emsworth’s affairs. Nor was he lacking courage. As an undergraduate, he visited the battlefront of the Spanish Civil War ...”

“... Crimp? What is the British Army like today? Dennis Barker has been given the freedom of the service, at home and abroad, but instead of beginning at the beginning (recruitment of officers and men) and taking us through selection, training, service and philosophy, he has employed all the artistry of a provincial ...”

“... George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of Bombay; Thomas Olivers (‘The God of Abraham praise’), a cobbler who was converted ...”

“... to eat dirty Lapp food, inquiring always about prices, land tenure and the system of military service. He also showed his limitations as an economist in the failure to relate recent improvements in Norwegian agriculture to a rise in population. Here the same careful and sympathetic work lets us see the Malthus family, part of the middling ranks of ...”

“... who went on to become Henry VIII’s great minister. Morgan’s son Richard entered his uncle’s service and changed his name to Cromwell in 1529. (Occasionally Oliver referred to himself as ‘Cromwell alias Williams’ – even on his funeral effigy he is described as ‘Of the name Williams, of Glamorgan, and by King Henry VIII changed into ...”

“... ingloriously surviving deregulation by means of cut-throat fare wars, extremes of cost-cutting (service standards compete with those of Aeroflot at its mythic worst), abrupt shifts from expansion to contraction, repeated transits through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and by what hurts Boeing: sudden cancellations of options or even firm orders for its ...”