“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... searches – one of Google’s engineers, Matt Cutts, used to organise a ‘Look for Porn Day’ before each new version of its web index was launched – but it did help Google to improve substantially on earlier search engines.Page’s undramatic word ‘recursive’ hid a giant material challenge. You can’t find the incoming links to a website ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... down. Nixon’s praise of her is touchingly unauthentic: she never indulged in the present-day custom, which I find nauseating, of hugging and kissing her children or others for whom she had great affection ... Only one of those rather pathetic Freudian psychiatrists would suggest that her love of privacy made her private even from her sons. She could ...”

“... in 1937 Graham Greene was chosen to edit an English imitation of the New Yorker called Night and Day, and it is a percipient comment, in view of the coming success of Horizon and the brief existence of Night and Day, that Cyril Connolly’s talent might have better fitted him to be its editor. The bibliographical ...”

“... might have been dining on infected tissue for years. The logic was there, and nobody on that day seemed prepared to challenge it. We might all be infected, we might all go mad and die. Scientists could say – and they do say it, over and over again – that they cannot demonstrate infectivity in the muscle or red meat of cattle, nor in their milk. But ...”

“... The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had ...”