“... it in his three big notebooks bought for 18/6 at ‘the Press Office in Smith Street’ in St Peter Port); but also ‘of’ in the sense of ‘made into’. It is Ebenezer made into a book. (Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude comes to mind, with its paper-baler who is finally baled up himself.) William Golding put it admirably when he said: ‘To ...”

“... and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel when confronted by Watt’s ambitious, analytical and ...”

“... Among​ the overseas guests invited by Tommy Robinson to speak at the Unite the Kingdom rally in London last September was George Simion, a far-right politician who had lost to the liberal candidate in the Romanian presidential election in May. The rally, an all-you-can-eat buffet of anger, conspiracies and victimhood, drew more than a hundred thousand people who broadly share the idea that innocent white Britons are oppressed, silenced, cheated and disrespected by a malign, power-wielding coalition of immigrants, non-white natives, perverts, vax maniacs, corrupt officials, crooked politicians, Marxists, gender heretics and academics ...”

“... was produced in 1758, Alzuma in 1773. And while we are on the drama, let us remember James Robinson Planché, born in Piccadilly, London on 27 February 1796, who is part of the Romantic Period and inventor of the Christmas pantomime. The list of his plays runs to over 150 items, and his entry to seven pages. (Shakespeare gets five and a half.) This ...”

“... needs to have an old orchard and a couple of herbaceous borders. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751) locates its perfect society in ‘spacious vales and lofty mountains, pleasant verdure and groves of stately trees’. This particular utopia smells good, whereas most of them are odourless, antiseptic places, intolerably streamlined and ...”

“... a hard copy and went to sit down with it in Kensington Palace Gardens, close to the statue of Peter Pan and not far from the Sunken Garden and the new monument to Diana, over which her sons recently agreed a brief ceasefire. Diana was pretty but the statue is ugly, fully humanitarian but not really human. ‘You seem quite content,’ a passing tourist ...”

“... manufactured a French infiltrator called Spy Nozy. How, then, should a Life of Blake be written? Peter Ackroyd is having a go at one, and I suspect that what attracts him is Blake’s London, for which King has very little feeling. The poetry is crowded with London voices and London places. I remember my delight as a student when a supervisor remarked that ...”

“... allies of New Labour. Brown’s chief man in the Treasury is his friend and generous host Geoffrey Robinson, whose enormous wealth is stashed away in a tax haven. One millionaire in the Government is not enough. As soon as New Labour was elected, its ministers scurried into the City to seek out millionaires to conduct the Government’s business: David Simon ...”

“... inhabitants annually. He had 48 hours to spare in Rome and, having conducted a mad dash around St Peter’s, the Colosseum, the Quirinal Palace, Trajan’s Column, the Pantheon and the Forum (the sort of itinerary that occupied aristocratic tourists for months), he admitted with uncharacteristic modesty that a full description of the Eternal City was beyond ...”

“... death ten years later effectively keep intruders like Edgar Johnson, Kaplan and the still-to-come Peter Ackroyd for ever out of the intimate recesses of his life. But in one respect Dickens, like Trollope, very invitingly opened a door for his future biographers by recording – in all its inwardness and sordid detail – his suffering at the blacking ...”

“... within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just papers any ...”

“... the city remains firmly in the background; more strikingly, a recent book about the young Joyce by Peter Costello, which ends in 1914, provides much valuable new material about his Dublin background and youth but devotes only sixty of nearly four hundred pages to his time in Trieste. This has not gone unnoticed in Joyce’s temporarily adopted city. A map ...”

“... in a fitting manner by the biggest tent show in the universe. As the Minister without Portfolio, Peter Mandelson, asserts in a document issued by the Cabinet Office: ‘millenniums only come once in a thousand years.’ Or at approximately the same interval as Labour governments with a mandate to do whatever they want, with absolutely no come-back, in the ...”

“... first from Oxford had no need to feel intellectually inferior, certainly not to Robert Robinson and the ‘dread’ Malcolm Bradbury, who seem to have been especially condescending. The petty humiliations of fame, however, gave her a new comic theme for the letters. There was the impertinence of photographers, who made her sit on a coil of wet rope ...”

“... it under his own control. In the end he went a step too far, nominating for a peerage Sir Joseph Robinson, a South African randlord who had been convicted of fraud and fined a staggering £500,000. Meanwhile, Lloyd George dreamed of setting up a party of the centre which would form a permanent part of every future government, guaranteeing him office more or ...”