“... independent central bank on the face of the earth, whose statutes, as the economist Erik Jones has pointed out, are also the hardest to change. Its singular mandate has been ‘price stability’, and only Frankfurt is empowered to define what exactly that means. Mario Draghi promised in July 2012 to do ‘whatever it takes’ to save the common ...”

“... to set up Unesco. William Beveridge, a Liberal, saw his Welfare State largely enacted; Creech Jones, chairman of the Fabian Colonial Bureau which had been founded in 1940, became the minister responsible for the colonies; and the ‘garden city ideal’ of the Town and Country Planning Association shaped the ‘architecturally modest and socially ...”

“... who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her ...”

“... every appearance of relish. Maybe he did do that in public – the Derek and Clive dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without ...”

“... is unfavourably impressed with her high-pitched voice. Sontag visits Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky in their hotel on rue Gît-le-Coeur; years later she will berate herself for namedropping the connection (‘how many times did I talk about Allen Ginsberg last year?’). Sontag goes to her first Paris party, at the home of the philosopher Jean ...”

“... taste, good looks and good manners are quite insignificant.’At the end of Decline and Fall Peter Beste-Chetwynde staggers into Paul’s room at Scone College, tipsy after the frolics of the Bollinger. ‘You know, Paul, I think it was a mistake you ever got mixed up with us; don’t you? We’re different somehow. Don’t quite know how. Don’t think ...”

“... are more confident still. Shakespeare’s recent biographers Park Honan and Katherine Duncan-Jones take it for granted that the play was his. Andrew Gurr, in editing Richard II, ‘assumes’ that it was, and the same assumption is made by the editors of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare and the editor of the new Arden edition of the play. Leeds ...”

“... his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school’. However, as Peter Campbell wrote in the LRB (3 February 2011), English painters ‘responded to Impressionism’s escape from the academic into the everyday, but made something tighter and darker of it. The French pleasure in picnics and river parties and weather wasn’t ...”

“... Everywhere is palpably Edwardian and Arts and Crafts including a relief of a peacock by Burne-Jones. A film about the First War could begin here, the whole place redolent of the dead and particularly the illustrious dead. And, yes, there are memorials to the men of the village and others round about, but it is these famously unfulfilled dead of the Lost ...”

“... a new idea and a new faith.’ Whether Harold Nicolson, inviting Osbert Sitwell, Raymond Mortimer, Peter Quennell and Alan Pryce-Jones to contribute to its pages, saw the ‘new faith’ in the same light as Mosley isn’t quite clear. ‘Week by week,’ Mosley exclaimed on the front page, ‘we shall put before you new ...”

“... at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the ...”

“... trumpet above the chancel arch, the dead rising from their tombs in their shrouds; on the left St Peter welcomed the saved into what seemed a rather overcrowded heavenly city; on the right crowned and mitred souls were being dragged in chains to the mouth of hell. On the south wall the archangel Gabriel was weighing a soul in a huge pair of scales; a devil ...”

“... red with juice, which brings back a film of the 1940s which terrified me as a child. Jennifer Jones has been involved, perhaps unwillingly, in a murder, a situation anyway in which her hands are covered with blood. This sends her off the rails (‘traumatises’ her as would be said nowadays) and the memory is buried. She then comes into the care of, and ...”

“... and some of the best-known contemporary exponents of biography have not contributed: there is no Peter Ackroyd, no Hermione Lee, no Victoria Glendinning, though there are three entries by Claire Tomalin, including Katherine Mansfield and Ellen Ternan, and four by Michael Holroyd, including Augustus John. Given the (exaggerated) claims made for the dictionary ...”

“... is a sore head or a streaky patch on a window. Find the remedy, and it’s gone. Limbo dancing, Peter Hain’s sideburns, the Angry Brigade, King Crimson: these films are always so good on perky period souvenirs, so skilled at avoiding most emotions apart from the fake ones. Though actually, I wasn’t impressed by the period detail in Misbehaviour ...”