“... local vicar must have been as entertaining as it was scandalous and shocking. Thirty years later, Peter Vavasour from Yorkshire was prosecuted by the High Commission for similarly provocative words about the Christian doctrine of life after death. ‘Tush tush,’ he declared. ‘That is but a tricke of the clergye, to cause the people to beleeve … to gett ...”

“... Waugh, as his last stories reveal, could not do without his Ambrose Silks and Agatha Runcibles and Peter Pastmasters. But one must not press the analogy too far. Waugh did become interested in himself as a literary model – very much so – and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a masterpiece of self-portraiture, one of the very best in English fiction. Even so ...”

“... your hoofs?’ asks Pushkin of the bronze horseman’s steed that completes Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great, ‘Whither goest thou, o Russia?’ asks Gogol, dithyrambically comparing Russia’s path to the flight of the ‘quick, bird-like troyka’ – are characteristics not only of Russian literature but also, minimally adapted, of Soviet ...”

“... language at the cost of its variety. Before this new translation by Ciaran Carson, perhaps only Peter Whigham, whose version was left unfinished at his death, managed to re-create in English the full orchestra of Dante’s tongues, his ‘strange locust-like phonetics’ (to borrow the extraordinary vocabulary of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about ...”

“... up with brandy, thus intoxicating the judges and winning the prize. 12 June. The Royal Festival Hall reopens. About a month after its unveiling in 1951 a party from my school in Leeds went down by overnight bus to the Festival of Britain where in the morning we went to a brief concert at the Festival Hall, such events ...”

“... own orchestra, the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra, which gave concerts every Saturday in the town hall. A group of us from the sixth form used to sit behind the orchestra (seats sixpence) and always behind the double basses. Drucker was a young man then but quite heavily built, a cross between Alfred Marks and the actor who played One-Round in The ...”

“... of the two images he would have found all that was wrong with England. 2 October. Finish Peter Nichols’s Diaries, a good read and hard to put down. He’s blessed, as Osborne was, with droves of relatives to whom he seems far more attentive and considerate than ever I managed to be to my few. Still they repay the attention and are a good source of ...”

“... understand quickly that Tokyo Year Zero concerns a real-life serial killer, as notorious there as Peter Sutcliffe here, but to non-Japanese, the novel seems to introduce us to a conventionally anti-heroic modern fictional detective, hunting a murderer of young women. Will the policeman track him down before he kills again? Stepping out in the over-eager ...”

“... in the glory years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now he was ousting the deeply unpopular Peter Swales, who had been chairman for twenty years, and I was in the stands cheering his arrival. But when I interviewed Lee, I was unsettled to discover that the takeover was in fact a corporate deal. He and his associates were buying 29.99 per cent of the ...”

“... Actually, this fly-pitched outlaw, spotted on the side of a telephone junction box outside Toynbee Hall, on Commercial Street in Whitechapel, had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing ...”

“... candidate – though the young Williams privately thought Foot too Oxford Union for Pandy village hall. In 1939 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, an informal precursor of the post-war scholarship boy, and in his first term joined both the University Socialist Club and the student branch of the Communist Party. Within Cambridge English his main ...”

“... seen him, in the tweed sports jacket of a young academic, performing, sober, at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 June 1965. I’d watched the Peter Whitehead video. American poets in those days, with their crisper sense of history and occasion, wore suits and ties. I’d read the free-wheeling ...”

“... Cherie instantly picked up on, is that Brown would never have said what he said in the conference hall if he had been free to speak his mind. It is impossible to imagine Gordon Brown in a private setting, surrounded by his intimates and his acolytes, using the word ‘privilege’ to describe his relationship with the prime minister. Compare this with what ...”

“... 2024, London’s annual Mid-Century Modern fair celebrated its 21st anniversary in Christison Hall, a light, airy, wood and concrete ceremonial space in the grounds of Dulwich College. Here you could shop for Panton, Knoll or Eames chairs, World Expo posters or fabrics by Lucienne Day, and leaf through a range of zines, maps and books, while the building ...”

“... Johnson’s euphemism for drunk. Getting back after one party, they spent an hour in a heap on the hall floor – ‘Says a lot for the drinks Peter pours.’ On quiet evenings they enjoyed the Benny Hill Show. By the end of their lives Lord and Lady Snow had become a half-comical duo, not at home in a new world (‘the left ...”