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“... pas de téléphone.’ In England his friends included Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore and Christopher Wood. He never met the self-taught Cornish painter Alfred Wallis but supported him and bought his work. It was at the Edes’ dinner table that Moore and Barbara Hepworth had their famous argument about which of them was the first to put a hole in a ...”

“... by specific occasion or active collaboration to have known Shakespeare personally, which relegates Christopher Marlowe to a glowering presence on the sidelines, and also excludes that engaging gadfly Thomas Nashe, though both had a decisive stylistic influence on Shakespeare in the 1590s, and both must surely have known him. I would also have liked more about ...”

“... the names that regularly provoke newspaper articles – Moon Unit Zappa, Zowie Bowie (a.k.a. Duncan Jones), Trig and Track Palin, Rocket, Racer, Rebel and Rogue Rodriguez, Number 16 Bus Shelter and Talula Does the Hula from Hawaii (known to her friends as ‘K’) – may seem a little less provocative. Michael Jackson did not, after all, actually ...”

“... Jamesian of Wharton’s novels: not only in its use of the international theme or the echoes of Christopher Newman and Isabel Archer in the naming of its protagonist, but in the implicit argument that the imagination of fulfilment may be superior to the experience itself. ‘It’s more real to me here than if I went up,’ Archer thinks as he pictures the ...”

“... of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big House. But it was clear to me that ...”

“... the scene by remembering a passage from Macbeth, an echo scholars have missed. After murdering Duncan, Macbeth tells Lady Macbeth that his grooms woke up briefly and cried ‘God bless us!’ and ‘Amen’, as if they ‘had seen me with these hangman’s hands’ – that is, hands bloody after disembowelling someone who is being executed for ...”

“... And the cracks must have been visible back then too. In the first episode, the MP and broadcaster Christopher Mayhew checks himself in to Warlingham Park Hospital (over the hill from Netherne) in order to show the audience that far from being a place of ‘hopeless misery, raving, violence, weird uncanny behaviour’, the ward, with its warm ...”

“... managed to keep in check broke loose, electing three Conservative leaders in succession – Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard – who were sworn opponents of Maastricht, none with any hope of winning an election. In government, Blair’s initial doubts about the single currency, prompted by the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect ...”