“... sporadic. My notes on some of these visits were published in the 15th-anniversary issue of the London Review last autumn. Here are a few more. 5 August, Oxford. Most of the cast of the stage play are taking part in the film, though some of them in much smaller roles just for old times’ sake. I have been given the part of a loquacious MP who happens to be ...”

“... the Stage By Mr Theobald’. The 40-year-old Theobald was an attorney by training, and a literary jack-of-all-trades by profession, but his standing as a Shakespeare expert was high. The previous year he had published an impressive book, Shakespeare Restored, challenging what he saw as the errors and complacencies of Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of the ...”

“... and that tousled hairstyle which seemed a much hipper version of the boy-bouffants favoured by London Mod combos like the Who and the Small Faces. His style was essentially transatlantic Mod – it came across with the British Invasion that brought the Beatles to Shea Stadium and the Animals to his car radio. This was the way Dylan was offered to ...”

“... to mind) may wish to consider why the Jamahiriyya, despite mending its fences with Washington and London in 2003-4 and dealing reasonably with Paris and Rome, should have proved so vulnerable to their sudden hostility. And the Libyan war should also prompt us to examine what the actions of the Western powers in relation to Africa and Asia, and the Arab world ...”

“... in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if we’ve made progress on any of them.’ It is not hard to guess what this hard-boiled gathering – Bob Mellish, Denis Healey, Tony Crosland, Barbara Castle, Roy ...”

“... State for Northern Ireland, Mr William Whitelaw, to invite the leaders of the IRA to meet him in London: a serious mistake by a British political leader who otherwise distinguished himself in this most exacting portfolio, and came nearer to solving the Irish problem at Sunningdale in December, 1973, than anyone before or since. The process of building up the ...”

“... and visit interesting churches and gardens or have dinner in Cambridge with the historian Jack Plumb. Her bad temper was due in part to intellectual frustration. She was an intelligent woman and her mother’s refusal to provide her with any formal education was one source of resentment in their generally fractious relationship. Another pleasure of ...”

“... as an assistant lecturer in moral philosophy at Edinburgh. After two years, he moved to the London School of Economics, where he was to stay for the next 35 years. A photograph of the 26-year-old Gellner, three years into his LSE lectureship, shows a strong, athletic, sexy-looking man, hardened by his passion for mountaineering and skiing as well as by ...”

“... thinking on North-South relations. This was pioneered by Lemass, adhered to by the underestimated Jack Lynch, and pursued most eloquently by Garret Fitzgerald. Charles Haughey, who had tried to arm the Provisional IRA in 1969, later claimed that he played a key part in what would be called ‘the peace process’, but this now seems as threadbare as his ...”

“... was black. Gates submitted it for examination to, among others, the expert who had exposed the ‘Jack the Ripper Diaries’ as a fraud. The issue of authentication was vital, and went beyond the nature of the artefact itself. Granted that the paper, ink and other external markers dated it to somewhere between 1855 and 1860, and given that the ...”

“... of Hong Kong flares up and amicably subsides. Entirely by chance, we meet the Pattens in London the very next evening for the first time since long before they went to Hong Kong. Impossible to resist mentioning the Keswick/Needham confrontation, by which Patten is totally unsurprised. Much curiosity about what he sees himself doing next, but no clues ...”

“... of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack Fairweather writes in his powerful history of the war. The instruction was, it seems, hardly needed. The fall of Musa Qala in 2013, ‘once the focus of the British military’s anxiety about their standing in the world, barely registered in the national ...”

“... thought police to do away with sex and sexuality, as an account of the lives of gay men in London in 1948, the year the novel was written. Woods quotes passages like this: ‘He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the ...”

“... the third person): Rather glad he came back – speech apparently immense success. Elsa Maxwell in London. Very bored with everything except his Cim. Cimmie: I am so glad we are like we are and not just ordinary hus and wife. Tom: Last night very amusing dinner party of about 20. Viola Tree funnier than you would believe. A new stunt – ‘learning to ...”

“... Higher Education and Literary Supplements; we know about HarperCollins, and hence about Jack Higgins, and about Fourth Estate, and hence about The Corrections; we know about the BSkyB network in Britain, about its role in pioneering multi-channel TV, and about its ownership of the rights to transmit Premier League football, which have just been ...”