“... gruelling routines had to be rolled around the palate and the tongue many a time before Clive James suddenly exclaimed: “A Shropshire Cunt by A.E. Sockprong”.’ I have a Y chromosome, so I can just about see that this is funny. But I can’t imagine that it was enough, as Hitchens suggests, ‘to make the long interludes of puerility ...”

“... was where his wife, children and extended family lived. In Shakespeare’s Wife (2007), Germaine Greer presented Shakespeare as a bolter who callously abandoned his family for several years, and she offers much the same view, if more mutedly, in her essay on his daughter Judith: ‘At some point in her childhood [he] went away and ended up in London. Somehow ...”

“... any special merit. Some came with more of a reputation than others, Mrs Miniver for instance with Greer Garson, Dangerous Moonlight (with the Warsaw Concerto) and Now, Voyager with the famous cigarettes. But I’m sure I must have seen both Citizen Kane and Casablanca on their first time round with no notion that these were films of a different order from the ...”