“... so far. It was, he says, ‘well up to the standards of the best British philosophical work of the day’. What he finds most admirable about it is ‘the way Russell unearths a single set of principles as responsible for problems which emerged in such a wide range of work, encompassing geometry, physics, psychology and pure mathematics’. ‘Few ...”

“... Washington on this matter at the outbreak of the Gulf War. In the Los Angeles Times on 18 January Douglas Hurd listed the factors that authorised Britain to use force against Iraq, giving prominence to the 12 UN Security Council resolutions against Iraq, and, in particular, to the call for a full and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. He ...”

“... that the present ceasefire in Ireland ‘will bring Ireland closer and closer to civil war every day that it continues’, he says as if coining the thought for the first time that ‘the year 1994 is more like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four than the real 1984 was. In 1994, we are beginning to understand the full force of the Orwellian slogan, “Peace ...”

“... each other once, that’s all,Nearly twenty years ago.We were not close and yet I knowHis death-day stretched beneath a pallOf melancholy that would leaveSomething of its gloom behind ...Or Anthony Thwaite:Now what you feared so long has got you too.The blankness has descended where you lieDeep in that building you already knew ...Or Steve Ellis:Hull was ...”

“... of their visionary experiences. Corso, who had a thing about doors, was lying on his bed one day when he saw the doorknob turning, the locked door opening. A seizure that occurred a second time on Crete. ‘Skinless light.’ He was young, clean; he wasn’t dreaming. There was a form in the light, pointing straight at him. Immediately he wrote a letter ...”

“... moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ‘Dan Dare mini-skyscraper’ in Swindon, or the South London aesthete Sextus Dyball, designer of delirious suburban villas, you might think he’s making them up. He isn’t. The North, broadly conceived, is Meades’s ...”

“... MacSweeney, Wendy Mulford, John James, with decent selections of Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Douglas Oliver. And glimpses of many others, the reforgotten: John Temple, Anna Mendelssohn. It is a truth, unilaterally acknowledged (Cambridge and environs), that Raworth is the man, the only English poet the Americans read. They like, or liked in the days when ...”

“... the way her administration was dealing with the ‘rising antisemitism on campus’. The next day, Shafik authorised the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group to enter Columbia’s campus. They did so, in full riot gear, and arrested more than a hundred student protesters. The police reported that the students they arrested ‘were peaceful, offered no ...”

“... as a child), he sneered at Hugh Gaitskell for not having any medals to wear on Remembrance Day and he loathed Herbert Morrison, his first boss in the wartime coalition, for having been a conscientious objector in the First World War, calling him ‘a dirty little cockney guttersnipe’. Macmillan’s diary is spattered with abuse of other public ...”

“... Channon had the arriviste’s anxiety that he might be ‘in Society but not of it’: Derby Day was ‘a sad day for me because there is always the possibility that I shall not be invited to Derby House ball, the grandest collection of people in the world. This year I have not [been]: I am inclined to believe that it ...”

“... where they pitched the tent. According to Marten’s account, their daughter died the following day:We were staying outside in the countryside. She was in my jacket and I was keeping her warm. I was holding her and hugging her and I was extremely tired. I hadn’t slept in probably two days. We’d just arrived there. I fell asleep with her in my ...”

“... in a ten-gallon cowboy hat. The obvious contrast between the sylvan dream of his upbringing – Douglas firs, rainbow trout – and the nightmarishness of his films was hard to ignore, not least because he played up to it. ‘As an eagle scout in Missoula, Montana, did you have such graphic visions of violence?’ a reporter asked at the premiere of his ...”

“... with Edward Said. That Ireland was a colonial, and postcolonial, country became a given of Field Day, the theatre company and cultural powerhouse driven by his directorship. Whether his focus was on the 6, the 26 or the 32 counties, Deane was never an exceptionalist. He thought about Ireland in relation to British Romanticism – as in his wiry, dense ...”

“... It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the GLC. One day, he had found himself taking the Underground in the company of a Tory MP. The arriving train was heavily congested and the unaccustomed Tory – who may or may not have been Alan Clark – recoiled from the throng revealed by the opening doors, suggesting ...”

“... his diary Blunt wrote: ‘I have remodelled Lady Gregory’s 12 sonnets, which I heard from her a day or two ago she would like to see printed in the new book, although of course without her name. They are really most touching and required little beyond strengthening here and there a phrase and altering a few recurrent rhymes.’ The first sonnet went: If ...”