“... in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All.’ In 1938, A.L. Rowse, who knew him at All Souls, went further, pillorying Lothian as ‘Britain’s public enemy number one’. That was over-harsh, but by then Lothian and the rest of the Cliveden group or clique were under fire in the press ...”

“... the history of the canon’s reputation. Interpretation relies on the appearance of fixity in all these trappings, though some forms of interpretation do try to adjust some of the fixtures around the margins and even near the centre of the canon, while taking care not to alter its value. The problem which promotes this illusion is that interpretation can ...”

“... What with all those Henrys being succeeded by all those other Henrys in the histories, and all those worryingly ghostly patriarchs looming over the tragedies – Julius Caesar, Old Hamlet, Banquo – you never get very far from paternity in the Shakespeare canon ...”

“... have called it if the Tudors had reigned, say, from 1450 to 1700. For Bindoff, it was under the ‘able guidance’ of the Tudors that England ‘rose magnificently to great occasions and experienced something of a Golden Age’. ‘No wiser or mightier monarchs,’ he wrote, ‘ever adorned the English throne.’ In the same year, A.L. ...”

“... the universities. It was from within this clubbish world that Penderel Moon, a sometime fellow of All Souls and member of the Indian Civil Service, produced an elegant biography of Hastings in 1947, a contribution to the ‘Teach Yourself History’ series commissioned by his colleague A.L. Rowse. Moon opened his admirably ...”

“... his memoir, Greene stages his puzzlement at this remark: ‘I thought of my parents, I thought of all those aunts and uncles and cousins who had gathered together at Christmas, and of the two unknown Greene grandfathers … and then I thought of the novel, the story of a hunted man, of smuggling and treachery, of murder and suicide, and I wondered what on ...”

“... himself a place in a Nazi handbook on Britain (‘Tweedsmuir, Lord: Pro-Jewish activity’). All the same, Hannay and Buchan’s other characters continue to obsess uneasily about Jewishness. The books’ minor villains and disreputable bit-players are sometimes Jewish, but the subject often comes up in a way that’s almost completely unmotivated, as ...”

“... a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner directing. To date I’ve written two drafts of the script and am halfway through a third.The house where the story happened, 23 Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town, is currently lived in by the ...”

“... hard to take. Coming away we scale the gate again, happy to have outwitted authority, but since all that stands between Open and Closed is a five-bar gate it’s maybe English Heritage’s way of turning a blind eye. 11 January. The doorbell goes around noon. I’m expecting Antony Crolla, the photographer, so don’t look through the window and open the ...”

“... to which readers of Latin were admitted if properly introduced. And the De Nymphis is the only at all readable thing ever written by Paracelsus: only about five thousand words, and packed full of anecdotes which became sources for later German romantic authors. Some friends would be likely to put Marlowe onto reading this, even granting that he did not read ...”

“... Vision’: the idea that, in death, the soul ‘lives through a life which is said to be in all things opposite to that lived through in the world’. Although Cuchulain is gentled, almost socialised, by his comforters, it is not so much a repudiation of what has made him famous, but, paradoxically, a kind of completion. ‘Late style does not admit the ...”

“... had ‘crippled’ him. This was his mother, the irrepressible Nancy Astor, a nightmare we would all want to be woken from. Too much money and too much mother; small wonder that Isaiah Berlin decided David Astor was ‘a neurotic, muddled, complicated, politically irresponsible, unhappy adventurer, permanently resentful of somebody or something … a typical ...”

“... driving him to Art. Not a bit of it. For a start the son was never liberal (‘true blue’ all his life, Monica says) and with a soft spot for Hitler himself. Nor was the father a tyrant; he introduced his son to the works of Hardy and, more surprisingly, Joyce, did not regard jazz as the work of the devil, bought him a subscription to the magazine ...”

“... studies, but ‘he was condemned to know that the little poetry he had written was worth more than all he could do with the rest of his life. The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a “ruined man” is itself a vocation.’ Eliot, it could be said, ‘made something’ of his life largely by not being a ...”

“... leave, the streets are full of disconsolate Roundheads and jubilant Cavaliers, the explanation for all the cars some mock-battle in Green Park. Note how one passes these far from sheepish figures without a second glance; the kind of extraordinary feature of ordinary life that never gets into a film except as part of the plot.In the evening, read at St ...”