“... marriage to Peggy, his Scottish sweetheart, that rapidly gives way to ‘erotic abandon’ with a French girlfriend. A dozen years later, MacDiarmid would be deeply wounded when Peggy left him for another man. For all his deploring of Harry Lauder, MacDiarmid himself in some ways conformed at various times to the easiest Scottish stereotypes: the boasting ...”

“... Taylor, Sharon Tate, Brigitte Bardot and Liza Minnelli, slept with Celia Birtwell, David Hockney, Patrick Prockter, Wayne Sleep and assorted tall, thin models: was he the one who had a life? But the later fallen, paranoid speed-freak Ossie, who fished in the wishing-well in Holland Park for the price of a packet of ten cigarettes, and cruised Hampstead Heath ...”

“... for ironic quotation – the casserole or bunch of roses which appear like fridge magnets on Patrick Caulfield’s canvases. But Morandi was not an ironist. Astonishingly, up to and beyond the middle of the 20th century, he painted pictures which play the game of representation as though it had just been invented. No stale tricks. On a map where every ...”

“... and documentary evidence: a triumph of rubber and tweed underpinned by collegiate spirit and, as Patrick O’Brian wrote in the LRB, ‘that fine zeal and conviction which arises from original research’. It might have been called definitive, but, as this superb new edition reminds us, history never sleeps, and nor does the sea. Evidence from the shifting ...”

“... scroll of recorded events: Rostov’s fractional pause and subsequent guilt because his French opponent has a dimple in his chin; ‘one bandy-legged old French officer, wearing Hessian boots, who was getting up the hill with difficulty, taking hold of bushes’. These details are more memorable than the names of ...”

“... to English readers which made him one of the notable translators of poetry in his time. He knew French well, though I remember his accent was even worse than my own, and his translations from that language were largely a labour of love, for his own verse had been influenced by French poets and particularly by Pierre ...”

“... in a book rendered appallingly poignant by her premature death this year, the brilliant young French medical historian Roselyne Rey observes that pain always was and still remains a poor relation in the medical mansion. Suffering, the Church had ruled, was the lot of sinners; so like the poor, pain would always be with us – which made it easy for ...”

“... nationalist cause. The Prendergasts came from Cork, at some point migrating to Dublin slumland. Patrick, my grandfather, married Mary Leonard. Her mother, Granny Leonard, I saw once, at a very great age, wizened and swaddled in a large armchair, surrounded by clan members. She was very small and a republican firebrand. During the uprising, she would ...”

“... age of seventeen and a half, but the internal backbiting continues. The current team coach, Patrick Kiens, was brought in from the Netherlands, which many Romanians involved in gymnastics seem to find insulting. Some gymnasts have refused to be coached by ‘the Dutch’, and in the mixed zone at the world championships last year, Ana ...”

“... of four thousand Jews, the Germans claimed they were adhering to a prewar plan drawn up by the French architect Eugène Beaudouin. In this case, destruction from the air proved unnecessary. New boulevards, highways and modern buildings replaced the picturesque squalor of the ancient settlement, much to the regret of many of those who eventually moved ...”

“... sexuality to an encounter group for unhappy smalltown housewives. (One of them recalls that ‘the French like black people, or might be black themselves – she wasn’t sure.’) She writes knowingly about voucher-based efforts to keep school segregation in place, and about the ideological formation that the authorities wish to foster in talented black ...”

“... Revival’ is the title of one important section of the book, containing essays by Patrick Minford, Martin Holmes and John Redwood. Minford recapitulates an already familiar analysis of the three parts of Thatcher’s economic programme, ‘the conquest of inflation, the promotion of efficiency, and the defeat of unemployment’, which were ...”

“... David Wright, ‘a literary instrument of precision’, and a long-time friend and supporter; Patrick Kavanagh, who was to be approached ‘with a large whisky in one’s outstretched hand’; George Barker, first seen ‘wearing a check suit and cap, all very new, as if in the course of an attempt to prove that he was not a poet but a bookmaker’. But ...”

“... the Class War leader writers lean more towards the Beano or Dandy than the tiresome headbutting of French art guerrillas. ‘Bash the Toffs.’ ‘Let your goat into their prize rose garden.’ ‘Kidnap their snotty kids.’ The stratagems are familiar to anyone brought up on the antics of Lord Snooty and his pals, while the topics under discussion rarely ...”

“... not a symptom, of nostalgia, and his view of the English past has something in common with Patrick Wright’s illuminating analysis in On Living in an Old Country. Of course, the polished images of the surface are still there. Hill’s poetry would be blander if the acknowledgment of barbarism were not accompanied by powerful celebrations of the ...”