“... education and marriage to a millionaire, Benn has descended from Viscount Stansgate through Anthony Wedgwood Benn to Tony Benn, his suits becoming baggier, his hair longer and his cool, posh voice flattening out. She has striven to be regal, he to be proletarian. Both have unfinished agendas: hers assumes a further purging of the remnants of state ...”

“... War. Within a period of a few months the Middle East’s most powerful military autocrat and the West’s most trusted ally in the region had been overthrown by an unarmed but disciplined crowd of citizens acting under the instructions of their religious leaders. As with other major revolutions, including the French and Russian, to which this political ...”

“... style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in 1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe Square, but you can’t quite see that. This was where I worked, though it was possible if one was so inclined to get to study in the much more exclusive and architecturally splendid surroundings of the Codrington, and a few ...”

“... star in films by Lubitsch and Cukor to the troubling singularity of the violent heroes of Anthony Mann’s Westerns and Hitchcock’s thrillers – an impressive plurality of the films of the 1950s that have lasted because they have psychological depth. Two other front-rank directors who favoured him were Frank Capra and John Ford: Capra served ...”

“... props in the Ken Tynan legend assembly-kit, along with the Mickey Mouse watch and effete-aesthete Anthony Blanche outfits he wore at Oxford, and, later, the poolstick collection of headmaster’s canes he kept handy to beat women’s bottoms. The cigarettes eventually killed him, but it is only with one in his hand that he looks fully activated, in ...”

“... thought him ‘a dark horse’, withdrawn and laconic; the younger poet and apprentice producer, Anthony Thwaite, remembered sharing an office with MacNeice in the late Fifties, when he was drinking heavily, as a far from comfortable experience: Uncertain of your mood, after an hour Of a shared office going slowly sour With cigarettes and hangovers, the ...”

“... stretched beneath a pallOf melancholy that would leaveSomething of its gloom behind ...Or Anthony Thwaite:Now what you feared so long has got you too.The blankness has descended where you lieDeep in that building you already knew ...Or Steve Ellis:Hull was the global meridianall poetry was measured from;and now you’re gone, a flat blank gapempty as ...”

“... Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader.Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his 94 years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his life to the briefest of ...”

“... revive a German army and pelt the Soviet Union with atom bombs. But later still, I went to live in West Germany and learned not to sneer when young Germans said earnestly that they felt European, not German. Europe to them meant neutrality, reconciliation, open frontiers. A few years before, some of them had gone to the bridge over the Rhine at Kehl/Strasbourg ...”

“... of suited twentysomethings. A few minutes’ walk up Fleet Street brings you to Number 188, to the west of St Dunstan’s Church, opposite Ye Olde Cock Tavern, and in an echo of Peter Blayney’s central themes (the business of books, and the Reformation), close to the publishers D.C. Thomson (the Beano, the Dandy, Scotland’s Sunday Post) and the Protestant ...”

“... and flora Trump was wrecking there. I like wind power, and loved You’ve Been Trumped (2011), Anthony Baxter’s documentary about the local people who had been campaigning against the development, and who looked, at that time, like they might win. I also wanted to see what Trump actually looked like in person; he’d been popping up in my dreams from ...”

“... the risks lay the advantage: embracing mortal danger could bring vast power and material rewards. Anthony Jenkinson, who became an important figure in the Muscovy Company, was as content wandering the White Sea or racing through a Russian winter on a sledge as he was dining with Ivan the Terrible, drinking from a cup he valued at £400. Jenkinson’s itch for ...”

“... the National to the Queen’s and is now previewing, though not without incident. Stage hands in West End theatres are used to long runs and find it hard to turn productions round as deftly as they do in repertory. Tonight, as the lights go down at the end of the first scene of ‘A Question of Attribution’, I wait on the sliding truck for the projection ...”

“... Roundabout in the East, Archway Tavern in the North, the Robin Hood Gate of Richmond Park in the West, and the Catford Odeon in the South. Eight of us are going to ride from John O’Groats to Land’s End: that way, because it is downhill, though into the wind, and easier to get back from, but most of all because we will fall among friends. Rose Hilton is ...”

“... first came when Churchill in 1942 appointed him Minister Resident at Allied Headquarters in North-West Africa. It is not too much to say that the job ‘made’ him. It was essentially a position which depended on the influence its occupant could exert, not the power, which was negligible. Macmillan had an American mother and he spoke excellent French. As ...”