“... despised David Lean. Another energetic hater, Wyndham Lewis, wrote of London in his novel Rotting Hill (1951): ‘a monstrous derelict of a city, built upon a bog and cursed with world famous fogs: every home in it has a crack from the blast of a bomb and dies at last of chronic dry rot.’ This was a commonplace opinion. Anti-urbanism had been an English ...”

“... lampshade?’ Here and in his more gnomic utterances (‘We are watching some dreary music by Michael Tippett and Daddy keeps saying: “When does the shooting start?”’) Fitzgerald also surely owed something to E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady appeared in Time and Tide in the 1930s and whose ‘Robert’ is similarly laconic, impassive ...”

“... of Appeal. ‘For sixteen and a half years we have been used as political scapegoats,’ Paddy Hill said (Hill died last month, aged 81). ‘The police told us from the start they knew we hadn’t done it … Justice? I don’t think those people in there have got the intelligence nor the honesty to spell the word never ...”

“... kind who travelled with their whips and palfreys, and with their complete virginity aboard, from hill to hill and from valley to valley; so that if they were not raped by some scoundrel, or some villain with cloak and axe, or some fantastic giant, there were damsels in past times who, at the end of eighty years of not once ...”

“... in the Sixties rather than the Fifties. The evidence, however, is far from convincing. As Michael Banton points out, there has been some reduction between the Sixties and the Eighties in standard social-distance scores, measured as willingness or otherwise to accept black people as neighbours, friends, fellow workers. He regards this as a reason for ...”

“... comedies made at Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, as Stubbs reminds us, Michael Balcon, the studio’s head in its heyday, was explicit in defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the ...”

“... to ash, a few displaced calcium molecules in my deteriorating memory cells.’ All gone under the hill; like Ford’s Presidency, an image of a too forgettable time. The first thing that Alf remembers about Ford is Nixon’s resignation in August 1974: the last thing Carter’s Inauguration in January 1977. It’s not just that history has buried Ford: Foul ...”

“... the translator herself of the posthumous My Prizes, in an exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible, and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped.’ But, still ...”

“... first time I saw, or looked repeatedly at, a painting by Frank Auerbach was in the art historian Michael Podro’s living room – it must have been in 1968. The painting was Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning. I’d barely heard of Auerbach at that point (modern painting for me was French and American), and I certainly ...”

“... Dr Davis’s book is a long, careful and detailed study of utopian writing in England from Sir Thomas More to the end of the 17th century. He has interesting things to say about well-known figures like More, Bacon, Winstanley and Harrington, but I found his chapters on lesser writers even more instructive. Robert Burton and Samuel Gott are revealed as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised ...”

“... 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 Holloway’s opera buffa about sexuality, Boys and Girls Come ...”

“... other selections from his working drafts. Yours Presently, the new volume of letters edited by Michael Seth Stewart, shows Wieners cutting across various groups in American avant-garde writing.‘A homosexual,’ Wieners wrote, ‘since he has been a stigma or outcast freak for so long, does not [usually] have a chance to meditate upon himself, even as a ...”

“... Readers making their way through Michael Bracewell’s latest novel may gradually become aware of a small but persistent ache: it comes of the author nudging them in the ribs. There is no chance of being caught napping during the various crises and cruces of The Conclave because Bracewell signposts them all with a diligence and clarity that would not disgrace a sightseeing guide ...”

“... startling to someone used to – say – Marxist criticism, or to the work of art historians like Michael Baxandall and Frances Yates. The emphases and conclusions differ – as they do between the essayists here – but the principle of balancing evidence intrinsic to the painting against material that lies outside the frame to make a critical account is the ...”

“... the idea of a slow unfolding from the incarnation as a moment in history was giving way to what Michael Hall in his 2014 study of the architect G.F. Bodley called a belief in its ‘eternal nature’ outside time. It was a shift of understanding that found expression in art and in architecture, but Ashton doesn’t discuss it. Beyond a few references to ...”