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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the matter in hand, which might be deeply personal or merely a means of setting up a meeting next day (or even on the same day). People would normally write without a thought of subsequent retrieval and collection – letters were simply the main instrument of civilised intercourse. The postal service was cheaper and more ...”

“... My mother taught me to read in the summer of 1945, between VE Day and VJ Day, when I was turning three. Time lay on her hands: my father, a major in the Territorials, was away in Palestine, battling Irgun and the Stern Gang in the latter days of the British Mandate, and wasn’t due to be demobilised from the army until the end of the year; and I was a pushover for her deck of home-made flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap ...”

“... just how distinguished Oxford was. Some at least of his reforms were accepted, although to the day of his death he was bitter that Oxford refused to implement his main proposals. Cambridge was earlier off the mark. In 1961 I got a committee set up to consider what questions should be asked, were Cambridge ever to reform its governance. A year passed. The ...”

“... scepticism towards the English cult of Anglican royalism in poets from Burns through MacDiarmid to Douglas Dunn. Paulin’s anthology further castigates English provincialism with doses of foreign poetry. The most immediately striking feature of the book’s semiotics is its tribute to French republicanism: the cover picture shows the Bastille station on the ...”

“... the Marshall Plan (on specific instructions from the Comintern); the opposition to Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 Senate race against Nixon (because of her support for the Korean War, though in all other respects, according to Nixon, she was ‘pink to her very underwear’). When Khrushchev’s 1956 report to the Twentieth Congress was released to party ...”

“... British protectorate in 1884 and the territory was rapidly expanded to roughly the size of modern-day Uganda. In 1895 a 300-strong contingent of Punjabi troops was brought in to put down an uprising by the Nubi in the north-west, which had led to the killing of several British officers. It was already possible to identify three groups of Indians in Uganda by ...”

“... politics which I hide from the Industry but not the women,’ he writes. Craven Hollywood agent by day, radical agitator by night, and round-the-clock horndog, he can’t understand why he’s catnip to ‘the Ladies’ Auxiliary’, as he calls his conquests. ‘Why me?’ he asks: I don’t have movie star looks, haven’t much money … I’m not ...”