“... inflames him, and then cunningly announces that she is embarking on a trip. ‘Darling Hera,’ said Zeus, ‘surely another day will do as well? Let us make love at once! Never in my entire life have I felt such intense longing for goddess or nymph as I feel for you this afternoon! Why, my interest in Ixion’s wife Dia, on whom I begot the wise ...”

“... good journalists with the novelist’s mania, a certain passion for what can’t easily be said, and a zeal of conscience. In the better cases all this gathers itself rhythmically at the level of language. In the Greenock of Ascherson’s novel, people don’t look, they ‘keek’; people don’t cry, they ‘greet’; and children don’t yearn for a ...”

“... and Other Poems, and ‘other books with similar titles’. Richard (whose names were really Edward Godfrey) thought nothing of these books and seems to have approved of his parents as little as of the names they gave him. Doyle refers us to George Winterbourne’s parents, in Death of a Hero, for the characters of his author’s progenitors, but he also ...”

“... gardeners – and their role in supporting the social function of the country house. These men are said to have had responsibility for ‘everything from designing elaborate formal parterres to planting collections of orchids and conifers’, as well as the provision of vegetables and fruit for the kitchen, house flowers, posies and buttonholes. Yet the ...”

“... Gallery. Emily Tennyson had never liked the picture, perhaps in part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence. Earlier she had asked Watts to repaint it, but he refused, and during her husband’s lifetime she had not succeeded in finding another painter whom she trusted to touch it, so that it ...”

“... of cards from friends of my grandparents who had read of my arrest in the local paper. I was, they said, following in the footsteps of my grandfather, a conscientious objector in the Second World War and a lifelong member of the peace movement. After the war, he converted from Methodism to the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. Mum was raised a ...”

“... all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war. Four of them ...”

“... to death some 687 foxes in one session.’ But hunters were also early systematic observers. Edward, second Duke of York, in his Master of the Game noticed what David Macdonald’s research has confirmed: foxes eat worms. As it became a more respectable quarry the fox was pampered: its habitat was protected, its enemy, the farmer with chickens, bought ...”

“... to the United States with Auden in 1939 (at the first squeak of an air-raid warning, Waugh said), has often seemed eclipsed by his two comrades in writing. In the famous picture of ‘US THREE’ on Insel Ruegen taken by Spender (with what he archly referred to as his ‘masturbatory camera designed for narcissists’) in summer 1931, Christopher looks ...”

“... name. The London Evening News printed its afternoon editions on primrose paper. Margot Asquith said that ‘when the Prince of Wales went up the aisle, he was a nobody compared to Rosebery.’ Until 1951 the Scottish football team would often turn out in primrose and rose hoops, the racing colours of Rosebery, who was their honorary president. Long after ...”

“... well-paid occupation it was before 1978 when Jimmy Carter deregulated the aviation industry (with Edward Kennedy’s help) and the monopoly airlines had on their most profitable routes was lost. Sullenberger and Skiles have to hold down second jobs to make ends meet. It’s also a less glamorous profession – there’s so little for a pilot to do in the ...”

“... final pseudo-nuclear option. Not that the garotting of the NotW should jerk many tears. Some have said that its torrent of celebrity drivel, xenophobia, materialism, kitsch jingoism, shag-’n’-brag and bullying of the vulnerable should be written down as a cost of free speech. Maybe this stuff is to the red meat of political debate what cowpats are to ...”

“... isn’t it?’There are nuggets, visual and verbal, at every turn of The Madman’s Orchestra. Yet Edward Brooke-Hitching’s new book (Simon & Schuster, £30), the third in a wonderfully illustrated series, is no gallimaufry. The Madman’s Library asked if a work of literature written on a shirt could be called a book; The Madman’s Gallery featured ...”

“... Most versions of the story prefer a Housman who was ‘suicided’ by society – as Artaud said of Van Gogh – or, worse, a Housman who was his own natural victim, repressed and mined from within. The familiar tale includes his Worcestershire childhood among numerous siblings in Bromsgrove and its rural environs, looking across the Severn plain ...”

“... involved with, but the ‘show’: ‘Have you seen the show yet?’ Hamlet could seriously be said to be the greatest show on earth, a must for failing theatres and rising actors alike. In the 19th century in particular, its ghost, its court, its play scene and its duel scene, its mad adorable heroine and above all its sad soliloquising black-clad hero ...”