“... editor’s (Karl Miller favoured the SDP, while Johnson favoured Labour). Nowadays I think he’d still say he was on the left but it isn’t obvious what that would mean, in his case especially. Like many people, he prides himself on describing things as they really are.As the Cold War drew to a close, his patience with politicians and writers of the left ...”

“... of the kingdom, is 32. Across the peninsula, the majlis, the tribal equivalent of a fractious town-hall meeting, has been reduced to a perfunctory ceremony, if not abolished. Saudi petitioners no longer throng through the royal gates on Tuesdays and Fridays to share a meal with their leaders. The new rulers appear to their public on ubiquitous billboards, but ...”

“... in 1968, remains exceptionally hard to find in this country. Now the second collection, Points de Repère, issued in France in 1981 (revised 1985), is available, in a rearranged format with a translation by the late Martin Cooper, under the title Orientations. It is a pity that we do not have both collections freshly to ...”

“... only a smattering of training … the dynamite bomb seemed tiny in proportion to its capacity to do harm; it could fit easily into a small bag or even a pocket. Using the pages of the Irish World, Ford and O’Donovan Rossa collected more than $20,000 within a year. Even those among the nationalist Irish-American groups who supported the idea of a bombing ...”

“... is a stocky, heavy-shouldered, neatly-coiffed woman of around sixty. While she doesn’t actually do the unloading she humps pallets up and down the lorry and does everything a male (and younger) lorry driver would do, with only a certain doggedness about her actions an indication of her gender. One or two passers-by look ...”

“... sends round a brace in a delicious casserole).7 February. Nick H. rings this morning to say they’d been talking over the play at the theatre and the general feeling is that Allelujah! (my original title) makes more of an impact than Past Caring and will look better on the posters. I haven’t looked it up, but I imagine ‘Allelujah’ is a godly way of ...”

“... my finger on it.When I packed my bags for London, at 18 years old, I went to live in a women’s hall of residence in Bloomsbury. It was a haven of warmth, calm and order. My course was engrossing, and it was taught by lawyers and academics of stature and reputation. I got involved in student politics: meetings that dragged on towards midnight. It was what I ...”

“... and his other interests, he became a spokesman on the tribulations of the Ovalteens. At the Albert Hall in 1949, he followed the Duke of Edinburgh and Clement Attlee in speaking at the Daily Mail Youth Forum – an audience of six thousand young people from around the world. He described himself as ‘a middle-aged old fogey’ (he was 46). ‘If Britain’s ...”

“... a bar of Turkish Delight from Mr Singh’s corner shop would have been a lot less friendly if he’d been visiting a house in the Lower Falls. But Branagh leaves this point implicit. If anything, the film eases its way into the favour of liberal audiences by ignoring the armed activities of republicans before the riots of August 1969. It is actually most ...”

“... canteen, between telling stories about armalites or girls, exit wounds or telly programmes, we’d all go on about how much we’d love to fucking kill McGuinness. To blow him up. To gun him down. To do to him what his crowd had done, and was doing, to other people, to people we ...”

“... the last bastion of the Ancien Régime in the Third Republic: ‘Had tea with the old Duchesse de Rohan … Tea with the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre in her Passy house … She is witty and wicked … a femme littéraire about whom there is sometimes unsavoury talk. But about whom is there not?’ He experienced one air ...”

“... which best suits our ‘ordinary, human qualities’. But in the end William Gass doesn’t do any better. Having pointed out the polemical nature of this opposition, he concludes that the conflict between Modernism and the popular conception of ‘home’ is just another round in the on-going contest between middle-class Philistinism and the true art ...”

“... hundreds of thousands were built, had a bourgeois look. Coventry Cathedral and the Royal Festival Hall were modern architecture on a human scale. Though a high proportion of Londoners were being rehoused in flats, the LCC forbade the construction of blocks more than six storeys high. So there wasn’t a visible ‘social revolution’, or an invisible ...”

“... and one night, having had to ring the bell and remonstrate yet again, Joe burst out: ‘I’d like to give them a right kick up the arse.’ This wasn’t like Joe at all and turned into a family joke, and a useful one too, as Dad never swore, so to give somebody a kick up the arse became known euphemistically as ‘Joe Fitton’s Remedy’. With Dad it ...”