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“... men – women weren’t admitted to Magdalen until 1979 – who came good under his supervision: William Hague, found guilty of ‘electoral malpractice’ during his time in the university’s Conservative Association; an advocate, at the Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy ...”

“... him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for ...”

“... We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in particular the Van Dyck portrait of Archbishop Laud. It’s hung beside one ...”

“... of a national culture. Part of the effect of the French Revolution in Britain was, as Leigh Hunt remarked, ‘to endear the nation to its own habits’. Amongst these was a mistrust of rational abstraction and a preference for intuitive, organic development. Led by Coleridge’s organicist political theories transmuted to a theory of ...”

“... the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony’. Reviewing a biography of Sir William Stephenson, a figure in British wartime intelligence, he declined even to list its inaccuracies: ‘To make such a charge against this biographer would be unfair. It would be like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 ...”

“... by the Inquisition in the 14th century. It had now been perfected into an Ars extirpanda: the hunt for heretics in the arts and literature had begun in earnest. It was April, always a cruel month for poets. The year was 1971, exactly ten years after the Meetings at the Library, when Fidel Castro concluded his speech (and the meetings) with a dictum which ...”

“... and Classification Department. It was hardly a heroic war.’ But he did write heroically. William Pritchard, in his biography of Jarrell, says that ‘in letter after letter, Jarrell turned the routine, the boredom, the loneliness and the wastefulness of army life far from the zones of combat into the figures of something like art.’ In February ...”

“... general for Ireland under James I, these people were ‘little better than cannibals, who do hunt one another; and he that hath most strength and swiftness, doth eat and devour all his fellows.’ Davies’s libel is ambiguously poised between the metaphoric and the literal, like Fynes Moryson’s comment that ‘in their hospitality … these wild Irish ...”

“... plain-minded sensualist, in whose mind art and sexuality mingled easily: in 1899, he complained to William Rothenstein that there was nobody in Dieppe ‘to talk art and fucking with’; after a period spent etching, he reported that its constraints were making him ‘letch for the brush’. He liked dirty old London and his dirty rooms. ‘He loved ...”

“... the basic initiation rite, were developed, Stevenson argues, in Scotland. His hero is William Schaw, master of works to James VI and the member of a feverishly intellectual court. In 1598 and 1599 Schaw issued two sets of statutes which established a system of Lodges for all Scotland. Stevenson contends that Schaw was influenced by Renaissance ...”

“... to the public at large. Impatience with the old ways had spread far beyond the media. Sir John Hunt, a former cabinet secretary, broke cover as early as election day 1983 to voice the discontents of the mandarins:In the absence in our system of a chief executive with his own supporting staff, a ‘hole in the centre’ of government was perceived which an ...”

“... three years earlier, and the two had formed an immediate but gradually cooling friendship. Leigh Hunt and his family were conveniently near (too conveniently, the Carlyles soon decided). They became friendly with John Sterling and with Harriet Martineau. They would come to know Giuseppe Mazzini, Geraldine Jewsbury, John ...”

“... more so because he was speaking immediately after his political chief, the health secretary Jeremy Hunt. Provocatively, Stevens compared the situation in Britain now to the time of the NHS’s birth in 1948, seventy years ago – ‘an economy in disarray, the end of empire, a nation negotiating its place in the world, a need for massive house ...”

“... there, but nobody noticed that, after primary school, Ronnie Pinn was there too, until 1980. In my hunt for the real Ronnie, I thought several times that I saw him in grainy photos posted by ex-pupils on Friends Reunited. Was he not the boy in the white shirt at the edge of a photograph taken in front of the school in 1980, with kids tumbling over each other ...”

“... and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy came over more as a hard-driving business executive.) On one busy day in the flourishing Saigon black market I bought an American fatigue uniform, boots, jungle hat and ...”