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“... scorn. Thus, when the headless chicken stuff was going on, or when the Tories wrapped the Albert Hall in a blue ribbon, it was hard not to hope that our disdainful visitor was spending the day somewhere else. But where? On every side, there seems to be some Toytown farce in progress. What, for instance, would Gore make of Christine Hamilton? What would he ...”

“... in the Tube. These flourishes resemble those in another account by a child with Asperger’s, Kenneth Hall’s non-fictional Asperger Syndrome, the Universe and Everything. Hall is only ten, which excuses his accounts of how much he likes lying inside his sleeping bag and how he likes to eat cheese grated with his ...”

“... Idon't care what Wystan says,’ Frank O’Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch. ‘I’d rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue ...”

“... a Q-Celtic language, but although the issue has long been disputed, the great Celtic philologist Kenneth Jackson was quite sure – on the evidence of names like Pittenweem and Pitlochry – that it was P-Celtic, though he thought it was more like Gaulish than Welsh or Cornish or Cumbric. The point is important historically, because it indicates that there ...”

“... and his other interests, he became a spokesman on the tribulations of the Ovalteens. At the Albert Hall in 1949, he followed the Duke of Edinburgh and Clement Attlee in speaking at the Daily Mail Youth Forum – an audience of six thousand young people from around the world. He described himself as ‘a middle-aged old fogey’ (he was 46). ‘If Britain’s ...”

“... top civil servants like Maud at the Ministry of Health, Newsam at the Home Office, or Plowden and Hall at the Treasury. Immersed in the question of who was who at Agriculture and Fisheries, one begins to wonder where Churchill fits in, and why Mr Seldon feels he was such an admirable prime minister. True, he set the tone by his initial appointments, but time ...”

“... so increase revenue (and the likelihood of floods). He didn’t get away with it. Sixty years ago, Kenneth Haworth removed George Gilbert Scott’s reredos and transparent iron screen from the chancel. He did get away with it. Pevsner wrote that it was ‘a crime against the tenets of the Victorian Society but the need of the 13th-century cathedral was indeed ...”

“... directed by Yeats. Other founding members included O’Hara, John Ashbery, Edward Gorey and Donald Hall, all recent Harvard graduates in their early twenties, as well as those like Lurie living in and around Cambridge. Older, established poets, such as Richard Wilbur and Richard Eberhart, added gravitas to the enterprise. ‘The emotional temperature of the ...”

“... with a roving commission on the continent – an appointment cutting across the role of Richard Hall, the paper’s Africa Correspondent. Nigel Hawkes, then Foreign News Editor, resigned that post in protest. The independent directors did not feel themselves called upon to adjudicate in that dispute since it was the editor’s own decision finally to hire ...”

“... an appreciative mention from Vita Sackville-West in the Observer, and attracted the attention of Kenneth Rexroth, who chose to include her work in an anthology he was assembling. In the course of their correspondence Rexroth became infatuated with Levertov, even though she was 17 years younger than him and so, as a mutual friend warned him, ‘badly under ...”

“... The Shell-Mex advertising campaign, lavishly praised by art critics such as Clive Bell and Kenneth Clark, appeared at a time when motoring was still more or less a luxury pursuit. Yet these initiatives made possible the ‘common culture’ of Britain in the Thirties. A ‘common culture’ is a slippery concept: to what extent does it genuinely need ...”

“... plotline. But how to screw the girl without ending up in the new semi with the pram in the hall on the council estate at the edge of town? Women in these fictions are enticing but dangerous, knees-together honeypots bartering sex for a ring. To quote Julie Christie, who would know: ‘They exist to be disliked by the heroes.’How, then, to make sense ...”

“... the glossier side of Tinsel Town. In effect Gehry devised a ‘critical regionalism’ (I borrow Kenneth Frampton’s term): even as he used new materials, he rejected the formal purities of modern architecture, burst open its abstract boxes and plunged the rearranged fragments into the everyday ground of Southern California life. But this LA vernacular ...”

“... and executive suites dreamed up by Rayne and financed by the Church Commissioners. The Rev. Kenneth Bartlett, who became vicar of St James’s Church in Sussex Gardens in 1963, infuriated the Commissioners by likening them to the slum landlord, Peter Rachman. Rachman, Bartlett said, had made life difficult for a few hundred people, the Church ...”

“... irrevocably other. Meanwhile, when the BBC wants to discuss Corbyn, its instinct is to call in Kenneth Clarke and John McTernan. ‘Britain and Twitter aren’t the same thing,’ Cameron said in his conference speech, by way of explaining why the pundits had got the May election so wrong. Cameron seems unruffled by #piggate (see also ...”