“... voice) no different from when I first met him twenty-five years ago. Dame Judi is here and Michael Williams, Dame Wendy, Lindsay A., Ron Pickup and Anna Massey, Keith Baxter, Percy Harris, who’s 90 herself, and Ralph Richardson’s widow, Mu. I am happily seated between Jocelyn Herbert and Merula Guinness, with both of whom one can be happily silly. ‘You ...”

“... sit at home and listen to those records.’ Starting out as a fan of country and western (‘Hank Williams, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, I was a real hillbilly freak when I was a kid’), he became captivated by jazz and blues, at first through Dinah Washington and Jimmy Scott. There were many musicians in the extended Rebennack family, and the streets of the 3rd ...”

“... has been the focus of attention for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member ...”

“... not alone in failing to see this. A few years earlier, Edward had published a review of Raymond Williams’s Long Revolution in NLR, which was more temperate in tone than his treatment of Tom Nairn and myself, but more wounding in effect. One of his charges was that Raymond had become half-absorbed, in manner and preoccupation, by the ruling-class ...”

“... Sargent was the man of the hour. The following year, there was an all-British programme: Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Delius, Boughton and Walton, before Sargent concluded the programme with Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture and Serenade for Strings, followed by ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and the Sea Songs. For this 1948 final Prom, some Promenaders queued for ...”

“... history, Adam Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an ...”

“... to Jones in the decade after the end of the war. He had converted to Catholicism, and joined Eric Gill’s community, self-described as ‘a religious fraternity for those who make things with their hands’, first at Ditchling Common and then at Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains. He had become engaged to Gill’s daughter Petra, and was now a ...”

“... was theirs, and that the Conservatives at Westminster had ‘no mandate’. As Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw argued in The Strange Death of Labour Scotland (2012), ‘Labour Scotland’ was always something of a myth, inflated by the first-past-the-post electoral system. Labour never won a majority of Scottish votes, though it came very close in 1966 and ...”

“... though odd, could ‘write wonderfully about the external, everyday world’; and William Carlos Williams, busy writing Paterson, is admired for his practice of going to the park on Sundays where he ‘watched what people did and made it part of the poem’. It is the great pleasure of encountering ancient Chinese poetry in Arthur Waley’s versions that ...”

“... MacKenzie’. I wish, as they say. 26 January. The papers are full of the beastliness of Eric Cantona who kicked some loud-mouthed, pop-eyed Crystal Palace supporter and got himself suspended for it ... for ever, some soccer lovers hope. Currently Walker’s Crisps are running a TV advert in which Gary Lineker, returning home from Japan, sits on a ...”

“... under this orange canopy, their interest focused on computer screens. It’s the kind of subject Eric Ravilious would have picked out, or Ardizzone in the Western Desert.Walk back through Shepherd’s Market, now smart and gentrified, cafés on pavements and all that. Except it hasn’t altogether changed, as in one corner there’s an open door, a lighted ...”

“... Christian Legal Society, as the first chief of the department’s faith-based office. He named Eric Treene, former litigation director at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, as special counsel for religious discrimination, a new position in the Justice Department.4 The most striking thing about the Republican convention was Bush’s refusal to allow it ...”

“... communicate with the pitches and rhythms that were the subject of his investigation. Like Bernard Williams, who made philosophy by recomposing Descartes, he, I believe, almost thought you could make music by recomposing Mozart.’ In FA the medium and the message somehow proved to be not quite the same thing. Whatever our conclusions about or reactions to ...”

“... 1 January 2003. A Christmas card from Eric Korn:This is the one about JesusAnd his father who constantly sees usLike CCTV from aboveBut they call it heavenly love;And the other a spook or a birdOr possibly merely a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening again ...”

“... Béarn, in the borderlands with Spain, his trajectory bears many similarities to that of Raymond Williams, son of a railwayman in the marches of Wales, who was aware of the kinship between them. They shared steep ascents from such backgrounds to elite positions in the academy, and then feelings of acute alienation within the oblivious worlds of ...”