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“... candidate – though the young Williams privately thought Foot too Oxford Union for Pandy village hall. In 1939 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, an informal precursor of the post-war scholarship boy, and in his first term joined both the University Socialist Club and the student branch of the Communist Party. Within Cambridge English his main ...”

“... to the past is brought home by the next musical sequence: while on tour, he is drawn to a hall where the celebrated cantor Yosele Rosenblatt, himself an occasional vaudeville performer, is giving a concert. This ambivalence is further developed when, called to Broadway, Jack triumphantly returns to New York, heading immediately for the Lower East Side ...”

“... stands at ease, his right arm hanging loosely at his side, the left raised as if he’s about to do something – look at his watch, perhaps? The photograph was taken fifty years ago, on 20 July 1969, and it’s one of the most recognisable photographs from the Apollo missions, among the most famous photographs ever taken. So stark is the contrast between ...”

“... The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and Bunting. Incidentally, or maybe not, Bunting also shows beautifully on film and still photographs, from the waggingly imperialled steely young man (‘one of Ezra’s more ...”

“... response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and scandal (Buñuel, for instance, tentatively ...”

“... the provocation for a pedestrian expedition testing the Brexit boundaries of a timeless mead-hall England, before the fleet of plundering Papist Normans came sailing over the horizon. Just as tabloid gangs of Albanian drug-trafficking white slavers were now reputed to be sneaking ashore on Romney Marshes, at Deal and Camber Sands, on their Rigid ...”

“... borrowit and to the blis can go: Chryst with his blud our ransonis dois indoce: Surrexit dominus de sepulchro. Or energetically and abusively in the paradoxical mode of controlled emetic known as flyting: Mauch muttoun, byt buttoun, peilit gluttoun, air to Hilhous, Rank beggar, ostir dregar, flay fleggar in the flet. Chittirlilling, ruch rilling, lik ...”

“... in 1939. But often they were small and private. In my own family, 1944 wasn’t remembered for D-Day but as ‘the summer we went along the Roman Wall on the tandem’. When did ‘decade-ism’ – history as wine gums – start? The first decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a ...”

“... the end of a hard day’.Pym’s comedies are disenchanted romances. Her spinsters often marry but do so with their eyes open. Men, they realise, are best treated as children – helpless and often peevish. Eligible bachelors and widowers with Victorian names – Aylwin, Everard, Marius – are blithe egotists: Fabian Driver in Jane and Prudence leaves his own ...”

“... his most unspeakable thoughts – ‘unspeakable’ in the sense adopted by his fictional Maurice Hall (‘I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’) – but also his worries and rages (‘Last night, alone, I had a satanic fit of rage against mother for her grumbling and fault-finding, and figured a scene in which I swept the mantelpiece with my arm ...”

“... dramas, and supreme among them was the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in the great hall of Fotheringay Castle. The momentous event, the inevitability of which was conveyed in a way that no history book could rival, unfolded in distinct tableaux, in the third and last of which Mary, who had already faced her accusers and said farewell to her ...”

“... She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently. There was a narrow passageway between the wall of crates and her personal pile of stuff: banana boxes, a disused bead curtain, a mop bucket. One of the crates has crept into the study, where the postwoman’s computer rears up out of ...”

“... tanneries along the slum route through the inner southern suburbs. We exploit royal visits, and do the same with our dubious anniversaries. The bicentenary, a brontosaurean occasion if ever there was one, is providing much that we could have done without, including a barrage of royal visits. But there are some welcome parks and roadworks, and with these ...”

“... it that none of them come by? Sometimes you think of leaving flowers in the passage. But you never do it, or let us say, you have never done it yet.To write about Robespierre you have to find the courage to allow yourself to be mistaken. Otherwise every sentence will be freighted with conditionals and qualifiers, and every quotation prefaced by ‘alleged to ...”

“... Juárez unfurls, a vast rectangular grid of sparkling lights. The bridge leads to the Avenida de las Américas, an ordinary avenue with streams of cars, shopping centres, petrol stations; it could still be El Paso if it weren’t for the multicoloured buses, the camiones, and the omnipresent stench from the sewers. In the new city centre, groups of ...”