“... was accidental. The folksinger Ewan MacColl asked Henderson to assist the American folklorist Alan Lomax put together a one-hour-per-country compilation of world song for Columbia records. The recordings that followed, together with others by Calum MacLean, formed the basis of the archive at the School of Scottish Studies. Henderson said that collecting ...”

“... And it remains pretty well known: the quirkiest testimony to its renown comes in The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett’s play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, when two of the wrinkles come alive and engage in a brief dialogue about themselves. As its furrows gradually deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard ...”

“... the lead book review, the lecture series polished up for publication, the heavyweight foreign-page reporting in the Observer or the Sunday Times. On that scale, he produced his best and most influential work, launching challenges and controversies that permanently altered interpretations of the English and European past. In his abandoned books, he would ...”

“... as much impact on neurotic symptoms as distributing menus would have on hunger during a famine. A page or so later, in a characteristic complicating move, Freud suggests that the ‘clumsy treatment’ offered by amateur psychoanalysis, the equivalent of handing a menu to a hungry person, nevertheless probably does more good than not letting the person know ...”

“... how it was spelled). They had names that defied gender: Robin, Bobby, Troy and some, like Tiffany, Page and Kirby, that in Mrs Ransome’s book weren’t names at all. The presenters and their audience spoke in a language which Mrs Ransome, to begin with anyway, found hard to understand, talking of ‘parenting’ and ‘personal interaction’, of ...”

“... book, penny chapbooks, an agricultural manual and an old book of essays that had lost its title page. He acquainted himself with ‘Mathematics Particularly Navigation and Algebra, Dialling, Use of the Globes, Botany, Natural History, Short Hand, with History of all Kinds, Drawing, Music’. He never studied ‘Grammer’, and always expressed a dislike of ...”

“... did then, and do now, choke back my tears,’ he says in one poem. Another talks of the page he’s writing on being smeared with ‘self-examination’s grudging tears’; in a third, ‘Isolation’, he depicts himself resisting tears three times after his mother’s death until he hears his father ‘bleat/round the ransacked house for his long ...”

“... the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan Bennett, has set out to make us love King George more. Or admire him more. From the start, Roberts is intent on glorifying George. Gone is the difficult pupil whom J.H. Plumb in The First Four Georges described as ‘lethargic and incapable of ...”

“... Melodrama in Three Acts’. The taxonomy of The Dance of Death, unclassified on its title page, though indicated within, was endorsed by Harold Hobson in 1933 as ‘that most frivolous of entertainments, the musical comedy’, here transformed into an instrument for serious drama, ‘as though one were to see No, No, Nanette taken, without ...”

“... with no prompts, straight into their faces, in a word-perfect articulation of the printed page. No fumbling with sheets of paper, no mumbled apologies – the business. There’s been nothing in the annals of performance art to match this tension since Jack the Hat barracked Dorothy Squires in the same gaff, back in the Sixties. The dump was known ...”

“... intellectuals, alien Jews and international pederasts who call themselves the Labour Party,’ Alan Bennett had Richard Hannay, Buchan’s most famous hero, muse in Forty Years On (1968). Another West End send-up of The Thirty-Nine Steps finished a nine-year run in September 2015, a century after the final instalment of Buchan’s best-known novel appeared ...”

“... explores the filiations between the Chilean ‘experiment’ and such Thatcherite figures as Sir Alan Walters and Robert Moss. In the course of his inquiries, he almost incidentally explodes one false claim, which is that Thatcher’s tenderness for Pinochet arose from his ‘helpfulness’ over the Falklands/Malvinas War. This is a canard, sometimes also ...”

“... and reach, but because of the wealth of ideas that accompanied his revival. The notorious 900-page Project 2025 document, produced by the Heritage Foundation, collated the ideas of 350 conservative thinkers and 45 organisations to create the outline of a vision and a plan for the second Trump term.While Trump’s first term looked like an aberration, a ...”

“... away from their books, since they ate cheese while they read and dribbled fragments onto the page. Yet despite such menaces – as well as the worse ones of fire, damp and vermin – innovative libraries rapidly took root. They developed into two distinct forms, one private and one public.The modern private library or study, as Hui tells it, was devised ...”

“... novels of Sartre and Camus. Despite the echoes of Evelyn Waugh, of Beckett, of Larkin and Alan Bennett, these seem to me to be the real precursors of Mr Phillips. Lanchester’s new novel, in other words, is that hitherto unthinkable, almost absurd thing, a great English Existentialist novel. Nostalgic rather than loathing of Englishness, as The Debt ...”