“... When I was younger I used to support a football team that no longer exists, called Wimbledon FC. They played at Plough Lane, a small, ramshackle ground in an ugly bit of South London (some way off from the Wimbledon where the tennis happens), and they played a rough, rumbustious style of football that didn’t endear them to outsiders but warmed the hearts of their fans, especially when it enabled them to turn over fancier, more fastidious teams, who often seemed to perform at Plough Lane as though they had clothes-pegs on their noses ...”

“... Hitchcock​ liked assembly lines. In the long, consistently revealing interview he gave to François Truffaut in the summer of 1962, he described a scene he had thought of including in North by Northwest (1959), but didn’t. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. Why not have him stop off at Detroit, then still in its Motor City heyday? I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line ...”

“... In​ 2012, five years before the wave of accusations against predatory men in the movie business, the film critics of the world – as chosen by the magazine Sight & Sound – voted to give the accolade of ‘best picture ever made’ to a piercing dream of male supremacy and female servitude carried to the point of murder. It was Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and plainly the critics did not vote in pre-emptive defiance of last year’s outbreak of dismay at the way men have run movies at the expense of women ...”

“... eventually into the Qatari national team.In 2010 the Qatar Foundation made a deal with Barcelona FC to pay $30 million per year to sponsor the team’s shirt (it was the first time Barcelona had accepted money from a shirt sponsor; before that its shirts carried the Unicef logo, for which Barcelona had to pay). This was followed by an even bigger deal with ...”

“... According to Boswell, Johnson was so hostile to gesticulation that ‘when another gentleman thought he was giving additional force to what he uttered, by expressive movements of his hands, Johnson fairly seized them and held them down.’ But in restraining someone else’s gestures, he himself gestured; he gave additional force to his opinion by expressive movements of his hands ...”

“... Arnold and Eliot ensured that the magic of monarchy and superstition permeated English literary criticism and education like a syrupy drug ... ’ Yes, this is Tom Paulin speaking. Readers of the London Review will remember the review of a collection of essays on Geoffrey Hill in which he bitterly attacked the conservatism of English poetry and criticism ...”

“... The shortest day of the year. We perch on the saddle of a promontory jutting west out of Anglesey into the Celtic Sea and look down into Wen Zawn – the white inlet. It seethes, the waves lift slow and bulky and burst suddenly, propelled by a force-8 gale. Rain hits our anoraks like grapeshot, pelmets of fog lour and droop on South Stack lighthouse, the airstream throws us off-balance and makes breathing difficult if you face into the wind ...”

“... Every picture tells a story – even the illustrations on the covers of books. Michael Kater’s cover shows a rather shabby, cabbage-patch Hitler attending a harvest festival in 1936, receiving the salutes of a crowd in which the faces of adoring women are prominent. The image is both revealing and misleading. The peasant costumes certainly alert us to the affinities between Nazism and provincial kitsch, and Hitler’s studied geniality also reminds us of his extraordinary personal popularity, always much greater than that of the party as a whole or of its other leaders ...”

“... The covers of two of these books display very similar views of Manchester, the ‘shock city’ of early 19th-century England. One is for 1836 and the other for 1851, and both embody a familiar picture of the Industrial Revolution: of factories pouring out goods, and chimneys belching forth smoke; of burgeoning exports, spiralling output and rising productivity; and of improved land, unceasing labour, accumulating capital and inspired enterprise ...”

“... Asa Briggs has just produced three new books. This piece of information is made even more remarkable by the fact that he has published 26 already. Admittedly, there are some, like How they lived, 1700-1815 and They saw it happen, 1897-1940, which are largely collections of contemporary documents, and which have merely been awarded Briggs’s benediction ...”

“... This is​ the age of anger. It is also the age of regret. While voters are busy channelling their rage at the way things are going, more and more public figures are giving voice to their private regrets. Men in Hollywood deeply regret the way they’ve been treating women for years and promise to do better in future. In NGOs, at the BBC, in businesses and at universities there are plenty of people who can now see that things that once might have seemed OK aren’t OK anymore, and they regret their earlier behaviour ...”

“... It would be nice, particularly after this summer of summers, to think that the Ashes remains the pre-eminent contest in world cricket, and that Anglo-Australian rivalry is still one of the most significant in all sport. But it is not true, and it hasn’t been true for some time. The rivalry in international cricket that counts at present is the one between Australia and India ...”

“... In late August 1964, at the age of 29, I embarked at Southampton on the Queen Mary, bound for New York with my wife Mary, our two children, five suitcases and the first chapter of what I hoped would be my third published novel. I was beginning a year’s leave of absence from my post as lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham to take up a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship in America ...”

“... In the summer​ of 2024, Donald Trump played a round of golf at Bedminster, a course he owns in New Jersey, in the company of Bryson DeChambeau, twice winner of the US Open. The ostensible aim was to raise money for charity by teaming up to ‘break 50’ on a par 72 course. The YouTube video of the event reveals that there were indeed some shots played, to the accompaniment of whoops and the occasional slightly mangled fist-bump ...”

“... George V has been as fortunate in his biographers as any monarch could be. Not for him the lachrymose sentimentality which, at the Queen’s behest and with her all-too-active co-operation, Theodore Martin lavished on the Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a double-decker biography of his late majesty; least of all the flippant irreverences of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, which caused George V to erupt with rage ...”