“... among the circles, picnic, dance, play instruments and celebrate ‘as many of our ancestors may have done for thousands of years’. The Megalithic Portal website’s vagueness is justified. Nobody knows what rituals Stonehenge was built for, and the celebrations in their present form date back a mere seven years to a House of Lords ruling under the ...”

“... many of them violent. But the bit of plot there is takes us, finally, to an interesting place. Richard Cane, brilliantly played by Danny Huston, is an infinitely rich man who owns every technology and invention and effectively rules the world. We are no doubt supposed to think of whichever American billionaire we like least. The trouble is that although ...”

“... not perversely to butcher Coleridge’s rhythm (‘A sadder and a wiser man’), and the mangling may just be Brett’s work. (A.E. Housman to his publisher Grant Richards with the fifth edition of A Shropshire Lad: ‘I enclose a copy of our joint work. The results of your collaboration are noted on pages 4, 22, 45, 55, 71, 77, 78, 92, 116.’) Then there is ...”

“... enthusiasm, ending in a wild ovation – for whom? For Grenfell or for Lipman? Some of them may not have been quite sure. This element of doubt in their delight is typical of that teasing ambiguity which has always been inherent in the act of theatre-going – an ambiguity exploited to fullest effect by the art of Barry Humphries. Perhaps because I have ...”

“... theory: if Cobbett comes out with something illiberal, unscientific or backward-looking, he may be excused and the blame put on the primitive age in which he lived. There is, of course, something patronising about this. He was ‘the last great tribune of the agrarians’, wrote G.D.H. Cole, and, ‘by force of circumstances, also the first great ...”

“... freedom of register was partly a result of his squirearchical background: he was a descendant of Richard Empson, a loathed minister of Henry VII, and grew up in a manor house in Yorkshire. He read maths and then English in the Cambridge of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, but the biggest influence on him was his supervisor, I.A. Richards, who advocated ...”

“... agent, a communist spy among the counter-revolutionaries. He knows the movie business, which may be the most pitiless of them all. He’s a liar by necessity and a thief at his pleasure. He’s a serial betrayer but the most loyal of friends. He’s a half-breed and a bastard. Part Vietnamese and part French, he speaks English with an American ...”

“... the movie rights. The subsequent film, which starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, as well as Richard Pryor and Lena Horne, was a commercial and critical flop. But it became classic holiday viewing for many Black Americans, including my family. The Wiz is set in late 1970s New York, dingy and rundown, full of dilapidated tenements of the sort the Trump ...”

“... on the other, as probably it is. This is not the first instance we have seen in modern history. It may be that the political options are so inexorably black and white that the right public choice seems to subsume all the private virtues. But such a vision excludes the accidents, the mixture of motives, the inherited irrationalities that are the normal ...”

“... poets for not getting their facts right. The most notable of these is the great Classical scholar Richard Bentley (1662-1742), who judged the poets by the standards of his own rigorous 18th-century rationalism; a good many people have remarked that his edition of Paradise Lost, in which he used the theory that the text has been interpolated by an amanuensis ...”

“... Sir, The quicker Richard Branson sells Virgin Railways and moves on the better. The last two occasions my wife has had the misfortune to use his wretched railway she has been 60 minutes and 110 minutes late. We are sick and tired of his artificial smile (it reminds us of Mr Blair’s) and his publicity forever in the press and on television ...”

“... and Ezra Pound, for example, at much 16th-century Italian art. In the Introduction to his book Richard Goldthwaite writes that it is an ‘enlargement of Jacob Burckhardt’s classic – and much-debated – vision of Renaissance Italy as the birthplace of the modern world’. But he takes no interest in the discovery of pagan antiquity, the natural world ...”

“... of rum-drinking in between. (Daniel notes that in choosing the rumba the Ministry of Culture may also have been influenced by the fact that, unlike conga and casino, which are danced by everyone, rumba is performed by only one couple or one person, while everyone else watches. This makes it easier to control.) So whereas rumba had once been done by ...”

“... in Alistair Cooke’s great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s self-serving book, Six Crises (a ‘campaign book’ for an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of ...”

“... for instance, offers his own brief allegory of the writer’s modern suspicion in The Information. Richard Tull, a novelist, hears birds singing in his garden, and thinks, mournfully: ‘say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from what they heard: those trills and twitters were imitations of mountain rivulets, of dew simpering downwards through ...”