“... wrote his mother from Cambridge from 1936 to 1938. Ironically, the letters themselves (edited by Richard Kelly in We dream of honour, 1988) often have the bathetic tone, the self-mocking grandiosity, on which The Dream Songs thrives but which the simple lyrics in Love – Fame rarely achieve. Berryman’s ‘Afterword’ to the first British edition of the ...”

“... and envy. Disapproval of English critical ‘conversation’ spills over into a censure of Richard Rorty: for just as the new, fully professional criticism is fighting free of ‘conversation’, that English laxity, Rorty is calling on philosophers to take it up. Yet a certain envy remains. The book oscillates between a lofty endorsement of high-level ...”

“... committee to examine NHS expenditure: the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way ...”

“... nor the darkness of sexual desire has changed so very much.’ He also writes that the allusion in Richard II to Phaethon universalises the King’s situation and that this in its turn contributes to ‘the enduring power’ of Shakespearean tragedy. I would guess that such sentences will attract a now almost automatic hostility. Lewis himself allowed that ...”

“... degree of detail unprecedented for a composer since Cosima Wagner’s diaries gave us a quotidian Richard. Stravinsky may well have reckoned on this in forging the intimate relationship (‘dearest Bobsky’) with Craft but he cannot have known just how acute and gifted an observer he would prove, how naturally sensitive a Stravinskologist. In describing the ...”

“... to Doris:             Yes I’d eat you!                     In a nice little, white little, soft little, tender little, Juicy little, right little, missionary stew. What for Sweeney is a façon de parler turns in some modern novels – Genet’s Pompes Funèbres, Monique Wittig’s Le Corps Lesbien – into full-scale ...”

“... us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... Young Dame Iris, by the way, took all as her customary ...”

“... Ladd-Taylor and Umansky – wrote into law many of the recommendations made by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve, in which they charged that single motherhood correlates positively with child poverty and crime, and urged that welfare benefits be taken away as a disincentive to further childbearing. ‘While more affluent women ...”

“... trade suffered and men died. The anti-war writers were divided between those like the Radical Richard Price, who saw in America only a beacon of liberation from monarchist and colonial oppression, and those who questioned the meaning of liberty in a society where slavery was still legal. Among the pamphlets and essays Johnson published was an early poem ...”

“... the certainty even of his own mortality, had gone to sleep only to dream, and they weren’t nice dreams. The whole play, as supposedly obsolete and defunct as Old Hamlet before he appears to the sentries, had like him become an old mole in the cellarage, discontentedly returned from some undiscovered country and as fiercely capable as ever of shaking ...”

“... matter as hopeless’. He disliked speaking about his background because, as he said (working a nice line in parodic lordliness), ‘one has so little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary.’ One childhood pleasure was rummaging among the books in his father’s shop. The hodge-podge of works he found there, from arcane philosophy to popular ...”

“... has direct experience of being enslaved: ‘The girl was worth a little prize, and someday a nice little sum could be realised on her virgin beauty,’ her ‘mistress’ thinks to herself when Aslima is still an adolescent living in Fez. But in Marseille she becomes a ‘strong and restless tigress’ whose ‘reckless’ behaviour often puts her at ...”

“... are nowhere near as comfortable as GNER. I’ve never had much time for the spurious populism of Richard Branson: his jolly japes and toothy demeanour can’t disguise the fact that he is a hard-faced entrepreneur. These thoughts recur when we come back from Glasgow the next day and have to travel by bus two-thirds of the way (‘track repairs’) and with a ...”

“... way through – it’s just that when you look there’s nothing there. Jersey is the template: a nice, genteel place, with a strong sense of civic responsibility and plenty of opportunities for public participation, including elections to all manner of public offices (senators, deputies, parish constables), but weak political parties, staggered ...”

“... we hear the first chords of Bill Haley and the Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So ...”