“... of Shakespeare’s Wife, I can’t imagine that any biographer will ever again dare suggest (as Anthony Holden recently has) that Ann was ‘a homely wench’ who may have ‘set out to catch herself a much younger husband by seducing him’, or that Shakespeare married her only because she became pregnant after ‘a careless roll in the hay of a summer ...”

“... that pull the community together, like doodlebug yarns in wartime. The Cypriot tailor in Dalston Lane, who still operates in the jaunty ambience that sent the Krays sailing to their fate in schmutter that made them look like Romanian secret policemen dressed for a perpetual wedding, recalls the incident in a decommissioned shop guarded by a pit ...”

“... paid, but you could augment your earnings by selling your review copies at Gaston’s in Chancery Lane for half the published price.At one of these parties I saw Doris Lessing – hair in a bun, shapeless dress, clunky shoes – frowning as she walked without hesitation across the room and introduced herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At ...”

“... awkwardly assembled and unevenly printed volume has commanded which preoccupy the first volume of Anthony James West’s The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, and they provide a very remarkable instance of the interplay between literature and the market, prompting all sorts of reflections on the curious relations between cultural capital and ...”

“... blossom as in a Samuel Palmer. In the afternoon we go over to Austwick and walk down the muddy lane to the clapper bridge. There are sheep and lambs everywhere and the beck is very full, gliding wickedly between the stones before flattening out over the fields. It’s a perfect scene and R. is just saying how we must try and keep it in mind next week (when ...”

“... White. The quarrels about ‘rubbers’ on this occasion did not prevent the birth of her son John Anthony. You might have supposed that Nature’s Time Clock was urging her to have this baby and that she wanted him ‘really’. Her obsessive desire to keep the child’s existence from her straitlaced parents explains in part the fact that she farmed him ...”

“... heaven and hell in which we simultaneously live. The crack in the teacup opens, as Auden writes, a lane to the land of the dead. Jane Austen would have laughed at this view of her novels, or found it tasteless and incomprehensible, which is why the modern criticism of her novels often seems unreal in relation to their actual world. Would the woman who wrote ...”

“... song for each of his four examples: ‘Mother Nature’s Son’, ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Good Day Sunshine’.)Mick ’n’ Keith have always been favoured by impersonators – from the 1970s TV fixtures Freddie Starr and Mike Yarwood ‘doing a Jagger’ to Stella Street and Pirates of the Caribbean – in a way the Beatles never ...”

“... them to devotion, not the real Russia they had failed to save. As a child of exile, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, recalls, ‘we lived Russia, dreamed Russia, waking and sleeping.’ Asked when he would take out French papers, Bloom remembers replying that he wanted to remain Russian and would prefer to die in Russia than to endure eternal exile abroad. Yet ...”

“... tome after tome on the subject of her untimely death. Come on down, the Murder Cover-up Theorists. Anthony Summers wrote Goddess, an exhaustive, exhausting and paranoid account of how everyone in the known world wanted Marilyn dead. He also did the actress the supreme disservice of publishing a picture of her on the slab. There have been many of these ...”

“... collateral damage. Processions of early morning joggers and a brisk uptake in the generous cycle lane provision signal a lurch in property prices: only the proscriptively young and comfortably situated have the energy to work on self-image and endorphin boosts. The dispersed community of beach drinkers fragmented and transferred a few streets inland. I ...”

“... Davie was first offered a job over lunch with Astor at Boodle's club when he was still at Oxford. Anthony Sampson came from Drum magazine in South Africa. Philip Toynbee arrived after his father, the historian Arnold Toynbee, called to wonder if Astor could rescue his son from drink, depression and riotous behaviour. Colin Legum, expelled from his native ...”

“... fractionally less lively than the identically costumed attendants, some of them startlingly like Anthony Perkins’s mother in Psycho.Then to an antique fair in the middle of some zone industrielle, every stall stocked with the appurtenances of French bourgeois life: great bullying wardrobes, huge ponderous mirrors and cabinets of flowery china. For the ...”

“... its territory, I do find myself often choosing the same spot. One regular place of worship is a lane on the outskirts of Leeds between Arthington and Harewood. It’s a nice location and of some historic interest, as in the 16th century the land belonged to an ex-Cluniac monastery that was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to ...”

“... May. Finish reading A Pacifist’s War by Frances Partridge and start reading Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor, both books covering the same period though from different angles, foxholes at Ham Spray and foxholes at Stalingrad hardly the same. Stalingrad is unsurprisingly a bestseller, the course of the conflict making it compulsive reading and almost ...”