“... because he was too big for his boots.’ Is this the writer who gave us sprightly books on Diana Cooper and, indeed, Lord Melbourne? For shame!Of course, many millions of Britons had been shoeless and worse when Wilson was growing up, or at any rate growing, and there came a time in the life of the Attlee Government when the newly instated welfare provisions ...”

“... I imagine, who stayed with the intriguing literary eminence kindly characterised, eventually, in John Sutherland’s biography.* Nevertheless, a suspicion persisted. Sharp little verses – by Thom Gunn and John Coleman – were flighted; and Ian Hamilton capped it all with a brilliant and damaging New Yorker ...”

“... Gordon Williams, formerly Gordon M. Williams: born 1934, educated at the John Neilson Institution in Paisley. Worked in Scotland as a farm labourer and newspaper reporter before undergoing National Service in Germany with the RAF. Has worked as a novelist for 16 years, based mainly in Soho but with a spell of rural isolation on the edge of Dartmoor ...”

“... Andy Burnham, who was what passed for leftish, leaving the door open for Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper. Enter Jeremy Corbyn stage left. He may not be a charismatic figure, but he could never be mistaken for a PR confection. I have shared numerous platforms with him over the past forty years and on key issues he has remained steadfast. During the leadership ...”

“... and no tea either, just today, a choice of pizza or a hot turkey sandwich. I browse through Duff Cooper’s diaries dosed up on valium. An odd incident at Heathrow. There is a long queue to go through security and a boy of eighteen or so comes down the line asking if he can go to the front as his plane takes off in twenty minutes. This he’s allowed to ...”

“... Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stockhausen and the panel of Any Questions. He envied Bruce Forsyth, Henry Cooper, Chairman Hua, and even Virginia Wade for winning Wimbledon. He didn’t have a clue who Barry Sheene was, but he envied him. Now, Sefton would have to add to the list of enviables ‘the most devastatingly funny novelist writing in English today’. Like ...”

“... you have none but ignorant medical men it is you who will suffer,’ MPs were told by Astley Cooper, sergeant-surgeon to George IV; ‘The want of subjects will soon lead to your becoming the unhappy victims of operations founded and performed in ignorance.’ Yet if Victorian anatomists come across as callous, arrogant and ruthlessly ambitious, Hurren ...”

“... 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 hand, for any consideration of Boulez’s importance as a composer-writer needs to take into account the major items in Notes of an Apprenticeship. There is some ...”

“... The George Eliot entry does not mention her brother Isaac, Charles Bray, Charles Hennell or John Chapman. Lewes gets just eight words (‘a married man unable to divorce his wife’). Sartre similarly gets no more than a dismissive sentence in the de Beauvoir entry. Beauvoir’s book on her mother’s death is cited, but not Adieux, her farewell to ...”

“... but a guy liked to have good hair. Then some magic descended on him, and the magician was John Huston, who wrote the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him ...”

“... society which was monochrome, buttoned-up and circumscribed, but fundamentally benign and (to use John Major’s celebrated phrase) ‘at ease with itself’. That ease was, of course, predicated on the exclusion and silencing of certain social groups: there are almost no people of colour in Ealing films – or in many British films of the 1950s, for that ...”

“... A small news item with a large history behind it: John Sylvester, an inhabitant of Lancashire, was released last month from a life spent in mental hospitals and institutions, aged 81. He had been incarcerated when he was six years old, and his offence had been the stealing of an apple. His mother had died soon after this first confinement, and so when declared ‘mentally fit’ in 1929, he became the responsibility of his father, who was disabled and could not take up his case ...”

“... rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic Pearse. After Toland, the figure that mattered most to him, historically at least, was Wolfe Tone. The rising of the United Irishmen in 1798 has long been important for republicans ...”

“... The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp ...”

“... I saw no cowboys on television but plenty on the movie screen, from the Lone Ranger and Tonto to John Wayne, and I still have a picture of myself as a little boy in a cowboy outfit with a hat and chaps and toy pistols. It’s a small indication of how deeply influenced Cubans were by our mighty neighbour to the north, and the way the fiction of the ...”