“... of the very best recent criticism of Jane Austen has been in essays (those by John Bayley and by Peter Conrad stand out) but there is one brilliant full-length study, Roger Gard’s Jane Austen’s Novels, that serves as the best possible introduction to her work. And Gard does notice Margaret: he calls her ‘the one completely superfluous figure in Jane ...”

“... with about the same clarity that I remember the young Jane Eyre, Mary from The Secret Garden, Peter Pan and Alice. Rather less clarity, in fact, since the last four are readily available on my bookshelves and I have reacquainted myself with them quite regularly. Jennifer, I’ve merely remembered from time to time over an increasing distance of years, and ...”

“... spoke to anybody, the shop was privately run so you couldn’t afford to shop here anyway.’ Peter Harris, another volunteer, was one of the first to move in, from his native Fakenham, in 2008. His career as a road engineer had been cut short when he slipped while carrying a 75kg kerbstone and badly injured his back. He hasn’t worked since. The ...”

“... and ‘the double-dapple’ of Wales its catalyst: an irregular and enclosed landscape, whose hill and river rhythms, like the sea-light of Caldey Island off the Pembrokeshire coast, freed him from the hieratic rigidities of Gill’s aesthetic, its trapped elegance – what Jones later called its ‘toyishness’ – and rigid closure to contingency. One ...”

“... who grew up on it liked its oddness without quite understanding how creepy it was. I mean, Benny Hill? And then we wake up one day, in 2012, and wonder why so many of them turned out to be deviants and weirdos. Our papers explode in outrage and we put on our Crucible expressions before setting off to the graveyard to take down the celebrity graves and break ...”

“... stalemate filled with rumours, conspiracy theories: drugs, communists, the IRA, the Angry Brigade, Peter Hain. ‘The demons proliferate … The enemy is lurking everywhere. He – or increasingly she – is behind everything … Nevertheless, in its varying and protean forms, official society – the state, the political leadership, the opinion leaders, the ...”

“... after his childhood that he kept with anything like childhood thoroughness; a number of others peter out like abandoned resolutions or with a characteristic Forsterian admission that he knew too much about a place in advance to be able to experience it. In Italy in 1901, ‘I have got it up so well that nothing comes as a surprise’; on a first Greek ...”

“... a more overtly political play.There may have been another play early on.A one-acter?Yes, possibly.Peter Dale told me you once produced a play at Oxford, a small piece by Harold Pinter.I had started another magazine at Oxford called Tomorrow. And for its fourth issue I’d written to Pinter. He had just become prominent then, but I’d learned about him ...”

“... view is Tim Lang, who began his radical contemplation of food during the 1970s, when he worked a hill farm in Lancashire. He’s now professor of food policy at City University. It was Lang who showed me Woolton’s map, with its premonition of food miles, a concept he himself developed in the 1990s, and when we met, he took me back to the repeal of the Corn ...”

“... versions of events. She and her husband adored the old two-room private flat they rented in St Peter’s Avenue, and fought a long, bitter and unsuccessful battle with the council to prevent it and the neighbouring homes being knocked down. ‘It was a lovely house,’ she said. ‘These days they would have done them up because when you go down Columbia ...”

“... the blue shutters of potential tower blocks. A comic procession of police cyclists puff up the hill, reluctant box-tickers for the eco lobby. A scarlet open-top Coca-Cola bus – Supporting the Olympics since 1928 – waits for the action, for somebody to enthuse. The low-loader, with its chorus line of shivering Samsung cheerleaders in white tights and ...”

“... not so long as the Kafka. I worked out a route, and set off in plenty of time. At the Notting Hill tube, where I usually boarded a train on the Central Line to carry me east to work, I took one instead on the District Line travelling west. This subtle adjustment of a daily routine had about it something aberrant, as in a dream where perverse and ...”

“... being received.’ I admit that I hadn’t heard of this institution, which is based in Notting Hill and offers several degree-level courses as well as many lower qualifications. Its website announces that it is ‘an Approved Partner of the University of Derby’, though it is not clear whether Derby actually validates any of the degree courses (and at ...”

“... US Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace, to be chaired by Anita Hill (who brought charges of harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991), is more effective. In the past few months, our understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment has been put under considerable strain. For all the remonstrations ...”

“... lists whenever a parent complains. Recently, one school in Florida restricted access to ‘The Hill We Climb’, the poem Amanda Gorman read at Joe Biden’s inauguration, after a parent complained that it contained ‘hate messages’.DeSantis is an extreme example of the right’s doublethink around free speech. In that sense he is a boon for more ...”