“... were not fundamentally good at this sort of thing.’ Several had an aeronautical background; young Mr Tebbit had been an airline pilot. But as they investigated Black Arrow, among the other items on their agenda, they found that only the aerospace companies directly involved in producing it seemed to be in favour, while support for it in government was ...”

“... first done their business. Even the best biographers in English have either stopped half-way (like Francis Steegmuller) or been too brief (like Philip Spencer); the most recommendable version of Flaubert’s life in recent years has been disguised as the two-volume Steegmuller edition of the Letters. Now comes Herbert Lottman, the diligent biographer of ...”

“... the Wye Valley from where Toynbee was living at St Briavel’s, and about a hundred years before, Francis Kilvert was writing his diary. Was Kilvert a good artist? Unquestionably and perhaps partly because he seems to have been without the tension and self-absorption which drove the pen of his confrère down the river at a later date. Kilvert adored writing ...”

“... alarms people because he is at the same time frightfully English and frighteningly un-English. The young Benn, with his prefect’s chin, boy-scout keenness and pipe-smoking gravitas, would have done for the hero of an Ealing comedy – reluctant peer and noble comrade. Then there was middle Benn, the new computer-speak, managerial whizz-kid politician of the ...”

“... dinner parties for people who sneered at the family; and, later, challenged the father of a young man he had flirted with to a duel because the son had failed to respond with sufficient indignation to rumours about Proust’s sexual tendencies. The anecdotes abound, one of them about the party game now known as the Proust Questionnaire. Answering a ...”

“... a hexateuch), was the visual sumptuousness: the arrival in Bucharest of the train carrying the young British Council teacher and his new wife; the Athens settings of the wife’s romance with one British officer and her scrambles up the pyramids with another; the North African desert; Alexandria, Luxor, Damascus. The series, combined with some well-timed ...”

“... that the experience had determined him to devote his life to music rather than medicine, ‘like a young man born to be a sailor who, having seen only the little boats on the lakes of his native mountains, found himself suddenly transported to a three-deck ship on the high seas’. It is no surprise that Berlioz’s full conversion took place after hearing a ...”

“... The unemployment rate among the over-65s looking for work was 54 per cent. A doctor called Francis Townsend organised a campaign to enact a national pension scheme and rallied a grassroots movement to support him. Though he didn’t get the scheme he wanted, he drew the nation’s attention to a group of people who were the clear losers in a crisis ...”

“... or C.S. Lewis with Boxen, Williams invented an imaginary country; his was called Silvania. As a young man he was bookish and churchy, cursed by an aptitude for writing average verse. Lack of cash led to his leaving University College London, but he soon found a berth in the OUP offices at Amen Corner near St Paul’s. He worked there for the rest of his ...”

“... us that for the original believers in the moral sense, both words would have been stressed. Francis Hutcheson supposed it the nature of the senses, when not warped by custom or tyranny, to grow increasingly complex and refine themselves towards an embrace of the beautiful and good. This would become the ground note of the Unitarian creed, the premise of ...”

“... Vanderborcht, John Vander-heydon, Adrian Van-Diest, Sir Anthony Vandyck, William Vander-velde, Francis Vanzoon, Herman Verelst and F. de Vorsterman, and with a little more diligence he could easily have doubled this collection of foreign Englishmen. Of the 106 painters accorded a biographical sketch by Buckeridge, 55 were immigrants or visitors to ...”

“... a lot of inarticulate Morrisite touchy-feely heart-felt good intentions. Led by NLR, the young (and would-be young) theory-brokers undertook a massive injection of Benjamin, Brecht, Lacan, Althusser, Balibar, Gramsci and Macherey into the Anglo-Saxon intellectual system. On one level, the operation has been ...”

“... Head. Thanks to its blacks London had an air of vibrant cosmopolitanism that attracted the young Wordsworth, for example, emerging from three years of blanched provincialism at Cambridge: Now homeward through the thickening hubbub ... The Hunter-Indian; Moors Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns. By the 19th ...”

“... Lewis? He certainly seems to know a lot about them. There is a picture on the dust-cover of the young Lewis (he was born in 1918) proudly at the wheel of a Bugatti, and he describes, too briefly, his dangerous experience with such a machine at Brooklands in 1939, his last adventure in serious motor-racing. In the Thirties he used to buy second-hand cars in ...”

“... third and last year as external examiner in the Department of Literature? Flying in, I was reading Francis Mulhern’s The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’. As I first looked over the students’ scripts, I thought of the Leavisite insistence that literature was the queen of all arts disciplines, the key to survival of national culture and international ...”