“... missile soon after Trump’s inauguration. The need for a change of tack should be clear. James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has admitted that Washington’s goal of pressing North Korea to give up its nuclear programme is ‘probably a lost cause’, and that ‘significant inducements’ will be required to deal with the ...”

“... Donegal and Cavan – in the Irish Republic. The colonial Plantation of Ulster in the reign of James VI and I covered six counties, but not those of today’s Northern Ireland. Ironically, the counties which became the redoubt of British Protestant settlement – Antrim and Down – were not technically part of the Plantation, which instead encompassed ...”

“... on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who ...”

“...  Henry James​’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... of his father in A House for Mr Biswas, in which Biswas daydreams while reading the novels of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, and tries to use the word ‘bower’ because he found it in Wordsworth (by way of the Royal Reader). The sadness clouding that novel is that one is always oneself even when one does not know it; freedom is always qualified, a shout ...”

“... making. In an address to the Royal Television Society in 2018, the current director-general, Tony Hall, made clear that he viewed the ‘big shift’ to online and on-demand consumption as the corporation’s most significant challenge, and the one on which it would be judged. He also discussed two other problems: the need for more money to sustain the ...”

“... in 1970s and 1980s Yorkshire that first made Peace’s name. This is a writer who compares St James’s Hospital in Leeds to Dachau. I don’t suppose the now closed Stanley Royd Mental Hospital in Wakefield was a merry place in 1980, but was it really, as Peace described it in Red Riding, ‘an Auschwitz, a Belsen’? Red Riding was published in four ...”

“... wheel), he was allowed on his way. This ‘Amateur Casual’, who was in reality the journalist James Greenwood, then went home for a second, more restorative, hot bath. On 12 January, the first of three articles detailing his experience appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette under the title ‘A Night in a Workhouse’. Seth Koven opens his rich and absorbing ...”

“... drawing by Larry Rivers, freeze him in a pose of brooding nobility, small and tough like Keats. (James Schuyler mourned: ‘even your lines have/a broken nose,’ a kind of translation of Leigh Hunt’s description of his doomed friend – ‘He had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up.’) ‘Frank’ has become shorthand for ...”

“... and statues of the Fonte Gaia, the municipal fountain that originally stood opposite the town hall in Siena. Although neither San Petronio nor the Fonte Gaia reflects much interest in the antique Roman architecture, ornament and figure style that so absorbed leading Florentine sculptors at the time, the tomb chest on which the effigy of Ilaria lies is ...”

“... Caliban’s withering speech on art’s place in society, pitched in the late style of Henry James where happy endings are in short supply. ‘We should not be sitting here now, washed, warm, well-fed, in seats we have paid for, unless there were others who are not here … others who have not been so fortunate.’ Near the end of his life Auden said ...”

“... unionists and Italian Marxists were forever dropping in on his house in Spitalfields, which Stuart Hall recalled as a ‘sort of permanently open unofficial conference centre with some informal seminar always in permanent session in the kitchen’. In 1967, Samuel founded the History Workshop movement to democratise ‘the act of historical ...”

“... when I was young. It was marvellous to see the long cord, which stretched from the door along the hall, moving so calmly while the sprung bell at its end convulsed. It seemed so easy to request something: a simple pulling of this wire, and people were summoned, came running. I opened the door; there was the familiar gloom and heaviness of wood, the sparse ...”

“... and Sacheverell, their ill-suited and erratic parents and their life at the family home, Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, have long since been lodged, along with the Mitfords and some outlying members of the Bloomsbury group, in the national Pantheon of the higher eccentricity. These are people who, it is felt, with some pride, could only be English and about ...”

“... touch is sure on those cultural areas which are clearly to his taste (from Philip Larkin via James Bond to Dad’s Army); his own affections lead him to spot nostalgia in places you wouldn’t immediately expect to find it. However, his tastes and affections contribute to a thesis which is in itself suspect, and whose generalities are argued with neither ...”