“... should be so much admired by the cohort from which she took General Tilney, Sir Thomas Bertram, Mr Woodhouse and Sir Walter Elliot.) Is Barbara Pym, too, a novelist for older men? Certainly they have so far been more gallant and vociferous than women in championing her. Lord David Cecil, John Bayley and Philip Larkin have ...”

“... Leatitia Hawkins (whose memoirs of the Johnson circle would revisit material her father, Sir John Hawkins, had treated in his 1787 Life of Samuel Johnson), and all about a past Queeney would rather forget. Although the characters do things (fart, masturbate, cross-dress) that Boswell never told us about and fail to do things (persuade us of their charm ...”

“... as I have the last five months. 17 February. To Leeds where the decent cupola’d building on Woodhouse Moore that housed both the public library and the police station has been converted into a pub, The Feast and Firkin. The Woodman, the pub opposite St Chad’s, has been renamed Woodies Ale Bar, in homage, I suppose, to Cheers. The more real community ...”

“... with HMQ still at it, and the policemen in the forecourt very jolly and eating ice cream.1 June. John Horder dies at 92, who, after a succession of bad doctors at university and in New York, was the physician who restored my faith in the medical profession. It was partly because he listened, as doctors have learned to do since, I hope, but which in the early ...”

“... Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been disappointed ...”

“... a precedent in Austen for Clarissa’s absorption in the fat lady in the cab. Emma Woodhouse, stationed at the door of the fashionable haberdasher’s shop in the main street of Highbury while her protégée, Harriet Smith, hesitates among the muslins, seems perfectly happy scanning the most mundane of urban scenes. ‘A mind lively and at ...”