“... bright afternoon with the paths down to the river covered in untrodden snow and the Wharfe winding black between the drifts. Building at the priory must have been going on until the very eve of the Dissolution, with the uncompleted west tower begun by Abbot Moon in 1520. The confidence such plans imply still surprises me as I’ve never quite got rid of the ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... prime minister.By 1985, Diane Abbott was tired of parliamentary selections, of being the token Black woman on the shortlist and of being rejected. She applied to Hackney North and Stoke Newington only because her secretary at the film technicians’ union, where she was equality officer, drafted the letter for her. She was up against a popular sitting ...”

“... for his unusual opera, The Plumber’s Gift. David Malouf has devised a Kipling libretto, Baa Baa Black Sheep, for Michael Berkeley. Blake Morrison is, with the composer Gavin Bryars, engaged on an operatic version of Jules Verne’s story, ‘Dr Ox’s Experiment’. Gavin Ewart has provided saucy verses for Robin ...”

“... the House with the bank, but even so, during his last eight years in charge, it was in the black only twice, and that includes the year of the exceptional one-off rescue package secured by Priestley. Tooley had a fine record of play-safe productions, in which the world’s best singers could appear without needing too much rehearsal. Ironically, it was ...”

“... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...”

“... feeling, they wept. Then, last night, the final twist occurred. The tribe fell upon her assailant, Michael Heseltine, and slew him, too.’ But the mere exclusion of Heseltine from the leadership seemed insufficient atonement for the unnatural enormity of matricide. Within the Tory tribe there was to be no healing, no reconciliation, no closure. This was a ...”

“... to have been participants or contemporary observers, or at least infants, in 1956. Except for Michael Korda’s lively memory of an Oxford undergraduate jaunt, they are historically serious and not only recollect but analyse emotion in tranquillity. Victor Sebestyen’s Twelve Days is well documented, based on up to date knowledge, and vividly ...”

“... children; she was well liked because she gave credit. The cloth-seller was a Tamil too, ‘a huge black man dressed in spotless white’; it was from him that the boy first heard the mysterious names pertaining to feminine attire: par-pleen (poplin), aar-gan-dee (organdie), and nen-sook (nainsook, from Hindi, ‘delight to the eye’; ‘the fabric that ...”

“... studio in Virginia. The film moves (rather in the same way as Dean’s tremendous portrait of old Michael Hamburger fondling his apples) from a world of light and vitality, glimpsed through the studio blinds, towards a final montage of grey trees against a storm-warning sky. Halfway through the exhibition one turns off into Soane’s strange shrunken ...”

“... characters bodies at all, or can’t make up their minds about them: Emma Bovary’s eyes are black in one chapter, in other chapters brown or blue. Lionel Shriver rarely lingers over physical descriptions, with one great exception: she’s highly conscious of how much her characters weigh. Her most famous novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin, is arranged ...”

“... prominent writers were associated with, or at least publicly supportive of, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. I could name names, but then I’d be naming names. What about signatories to an open letter requesting that Obama pardon Edward Snowden? I spoke on the phone this afternoon to the guy who wrote it. Was the FBI listening? Probably not, but at ...”

“... Ofqual’s way of dealing with public opinion was to hire a PR firm run by former associates of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, in a contract awarded without a process of competitive tendering.When the A level results were published on 13 August, 39 per cent of teacher-predicted grades had been revised downwards. The resulting furore – including a ...”

“... Ionce​ drove to Forest Lawn Memorial Park. It was before Michael Jackson had his crypt there, but I remember finding Walt Disney’s grave and that of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. A few writers are there too: Theodore Dreiser, who wrote well about department stores in Sister Carrie, and Clifford Odets, who believed shopping was one of America’s chronic diseases ...”

“... immortality on anyone who drinks from it. Two prophets with blazing haloes are seen against a black background, examining a fish that has been revived by the water. Alexander looks on from a distance. The legends tell of various mishaps that prevented the water from reaching his lips, condemning him to an early death.These voyages into the unknown promote ...”