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“... nurses and auxiliaries, scanning his patient details, would cheerily address him as ‘John’.) He was already using the name that was to become so familiar, the byline that launched a thousand pieces. Was he already that ‘Frank Kermode’, that effortlessly elegant, perceptive, slyly amusing, wide-ranging critic? Not really, not to judge by ...”

“... were returning my stare! They belonged to a strangely compelling creature which … immediately took possession of me. This was my introduction to the work of Hirshfield.’The strangely compelling creature was Angora Cat, one of only two paintings Morris Hirshfield had begun before 1939. He was 67. In the seven years before his death in 1946, he painted ...”

“... of History’ is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and ...”

“... his rude tongue perpetually thrust into someone else’s cheek. He pronounces: Eliot sat here, he took a tram, he dined alone in the ‘white’ room. Look at his memorial, his Margate plaque, the anagram on the side of the public convenience: toilets. There’s still puff left, after Seabrook has swooped on a Stanley knife lying in the gutter, ducked into a ...”

“... that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of ...”

“... seat in Massachusetts. The scale of these victories made them particularly ominous. McDonnell took 59 per cent of the votes and Brown 52 per cent, in states where Obama a year earlier had pulled 53 per cent and 62 per cent respectively. Interviews suggested that these contests were interpreted by voters above all as referendums on the Obama ...”

“... reggae music, multi-media happenings, what have you. But bless me, it seems I was wrong. For if John Gross isn’t duplicating for a later generation what the Earl of Birkenhead did for mine, I don’t know what he and the marketing managers at Oxford University Press think they are doing. What readers can they think they are catering for, if not such ...”

“... where I might try again. Mr Baker’s anthology was on the best-seller list by the summer, when I took it down to Dorset and found the place where it would really come to life. Driving up from West Lulworth, I left behind the yellow fields of EEC oil seed rape and travelled up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles ...”

“... As John Berryman​ tells it, in a Paris Review interview conducted in 1970, he was walking to a bar in Minneapolis one evening in the mid-1950s with his second wife, Anne, the two of them joking back and forth, when Berryman volunteered that he ‘hated the name Mabel more than any other female name’. Anne decided Henry was the name she found ‘unbearable ...”

“... Up the lane, at the lodge of an army camp, a ‘Yorkshire terrier’ ran about. The young poet took ‘the Carlisle train’ to school ‘in Dorset’, people had maps of Flanders above the fireplace to follow the progress of the First World War, and German prisoners were held on a ship on Belfast Lough. Ulster was a microcosm of the British-Irish ...”

“... Register called it ‘Silly Billy’s Tomfoolery’ and dismissed its ‘indecent trash’. John Bull said that ‘the dirty abominations of the raffs of literature are far below notice,’ then devoted three issues to reviews, spoofs and comments on the book. They even got hold of one of his letters to her, and published it (thus, ironically, doing a ...”

“... in class and the kids feel righteous – righteous but cosy. A Walk to Pubble Shrub Gardens for John and Tina McClelland This fawn plastic box contains my archive, a ghat of paper I set single words on like a loyal wife who must turn to ash and bone out of love. It’s the grist, I lie to them, for a curt essay on the Girondins whom of course I condemn ...”

“... the agenda for much of Italian national life, both public and private. In the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII’s famous encyclicals, Mater et magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), together with his summoning of the Second Vatican Council, produced great ferment in the Catholic world. But the radical tide ebbed, and the long and powerful pontificate of ...”

“... In October last year, after discussions that took place over just nine days, the BBC agreed to take the funding of the World Service off the hands of the government from 2014. At the same time, as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review, the Foreign Office announced a 16 per cent cut – £46 million – in the World Service budget ...”