“... and vignettes. ‘I am Mrs Sabawala,’ an Indian admirer announces. ‘My house on Malabar Hill is a sermon in stone. Lunch with me tomorrow.’ He takes part in a gala at the Foreign Office to celebrate the visit of the French President in March 1939: ‘It was a tremendous affair, the last of its kind before the war and I could not help referring to ...”

“... reserves of only 8.5 billion to 14 billion barrels. To the companies’ fury, the LSE academic, Peter Odell, argued that this was just an oligopolistic fudge: the true reserves he estimated to be between 78 and 100 billion barrels. In the end this turned out to be far closer to the truth: the early estimates of Brent and Forties both had to be upped ...”

“... Heaney and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, its postwar section makes room for Monty Python but not Geoffrey Hill, or Tony Harrison, or Thom Gunn, or Ted Hughes, or Craig Raine, or James Fenton, or Paul Muldoon, all of whom the Norton squeezes in at the eleventh hour. Ricks, for whom Heaney provides an effective endpoint, is probably right that many anthologies falter ...”

“... a ‘legendary period in movies’. In The Last Picture Show, Welles’s friend and protégé Peter Bogdanovich had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of ...”

“... What did a ride on a rhinoceros cost in 1684? At the Belle Sauvage Inn, at the bottom of Ludgate Hill, one shilling would have bought you a glimpse of the rhino, while for two shillings you could sit on its back. Grigson has included a second index specifically for animals, with entries under, say, ‘Elephant’, such as ‘African, Henry ...”

“... of those who witnessed the pre-internet, pre-phone-camera world:It reminded me of standing on a hill, in the dark, with a big industrial plant in the distance and just feeling this roar: this massive earthly vibration, like the silence had been taken over by something that was even deeper than silence itself, something that silence implied, in a way, like ...”

“... Leopold Bloom might muse. We hear the biff biff of two helicopters above the council estate on the hill. Then he describes a recent shoot-out: helicopters and SAS men waiting at the bridge, shooting, a wounded IRA man hiding in the roofspace of a row of council houses and moving from one to the other as the houses are searched again and again. The estate is ...”

“... AJPT and Lewis, but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English eccentricity: an older world of indulgence, scandal, fun and ...”

“... of the godly cause – Sir Walter Mildmay, founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the MP Peter Wentworth, who agitated for further reform of the English church and its liturgy – may deserve further attention. He once declared that ‘I would have all reformations done by public authority. It were very dangerous that every private man’s zeal ...”

“... is the flesh Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move Along the side-fall of the hill – Maguire and his men . . . This is brilliantly mimetic: the initial heavy stress of ‘clay’ drops to the short stresses of ‘is’ and ‘the’, bringing on the stooping of the potato-gatherers of the next line. The rhythm (one and a two and one ...”

“... however. Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster General, was obliged to resign when it was revealed that Peter Mandelson had borrowed around £400,000 from him to buy a house in Notting Hill. Robinson stayed out in the cold while Mandelson, the man who borrowed the money, was reinstated a year later. Robinson’s special ...”

“... which ‘conjures up the now familiar and haunting spectre of urban alienation’. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar is a ‘particularly depressing place to live in’, with an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’, mainly an ‘example of the late modernist avant-garde determination to realise a theoretical position at ...”

“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”

“... were staged with unprecedented intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic minorities. In ...”

“... a series sponsored by the British Council. It involved a polite, stiff-collared viva with Peter Orr. The fourth item in the catalogue is a bootleg cassette of this curiosity that passed through my hands. Prynne is forensically precise behind layers of defensive qualification. We could be listening, chins on cupped hands, to a crackling Bakelite ...”