“... lessons in parody from The Diary of a Nobody and that her comic timing owes something to the music hall. Debunking the Victorian or fuddy-duddy in a flip tone, however, is more Coward or Waugh than Pooter. (In later years she would look back and ‘wriggle’ at her facetiousness.) She is not always high-spirited. Her diary is also a commonplace book where she ...”

“... in their judgment of modern architecture – compared with such contemporaries as Alice Coleman, Simon Jenkins or Charles Windsor they are positively nuanced, and they wrote presciently of the social and architectural success of Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in the early 1980s – their book also reflects a view that ‘almost everyone believed in and ...”

“... was reflected in the holding of the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition at the Albert Hall to mark Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and in the formation of the Jewish Historical Society of England six years later. Concern about integrating the new immigrants into Anglo-Jewry led to the hurried building of new synagogues in areas such as ...”

“... the readership of the Lancet. We hear about public lectures, such as the one given at Caxton Hall in 1911 under the sinister title, ‘Heredity and the Jew’. Finally – Roy Lowe in particular has levelled this charge – we are told that in the 1930s eugenists captured a major citadel of environmentalist and ameliorative opinion when the Board of ...”

“... NHS always cry out against the past. They see only ugliness and failure, never success, and, like Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian last month, they seem content to throw out the baby, the bathwater, the taps, along with the reservoir supplying the taps. Jenkins is right when he says there are too many back-office staff in the NHS, but this isn’t his ...”

“... The ghosts we deserve’ was the Listener’s headline for Simon Raven’s review of Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece in December 1952. Most reviewers had gushed with sentimental enthusiasm for these memoirs of a late Victorian academic childhood in Cambridge, so helping to make them one of the most ‘unlikely bestsellers’ of the later 20th century (the book has never been out of print and in Cambridge, at least, still sells briskly to locals and tourists alike ...”

“... Joe said. ‘But he never won a thing.’ The Streak, the marriage to Monroe, the reference in the Simon and Garfunkel song (‘Where have you gone . . .’) and the old geezer waving to the crowd at Yankee Stadium are as much of DiMaggio as most people know – or knew before this book was published. ‘The Hero’s Life’ of Cramer’s subtitle is not to ...”

“... off here and there the note of each species, as if he had been a child left alone in a concert hall with the deserted instruments of a full orchestra. Finding a sealion snoring on the bank of its pool, he rippled the water suddenly. He was a quarter of a mile away when he heard the responding bark.In this vision of an animal meeting neighbours he has never ...”

“... fragmentation and isolation – and a retreat into private lives and private housing – the dance hall and the discotheque became increasingly valuable, a rare public space. According to Truman Capote, ‘disco is the best floor show in town. It’s very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and ...”

“... the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer, with profuse footnotes displaying considerable scholarship and intermittent pedantry.As Heffer says, Channon was seen as ‘trivial, snobbish, shallow and profoundly lacking in judgment’, a toady to the rich and royal, and, according to Nancy ...”

“... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have ...”

“... or seven operas flourished in the theatre – nothing could have kept them down; so in the concert hall did the Requiem. All that is utterly changed. Verdi’s 26 operas (28 if you count revisions under new titles) have all been performed; few, perhaps two or three at most, seem unlikely to hold the stage. Julian Budden’s three-volume study is only the chief ...”

“... where’s your sense of humour? It’s only a joke.’7 May. On the TV news footage of Stuart Hall arriving for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he manages this without much help, which is ...”

“... should be left at his side.) Or perhaps it is both simpler and more complicated. ‘Writing,’ Simon Goldhill declares in his slippery new book about the Bensons, ‘is a pathological response to being in a family.’ There are​ other questions worth asking. Why do we care? What exactly is the point of the Bensons? ‘A very odd brotherhood,’ the ...”

“... which, though emotionally logical, I doubt you would guess (and which I shan’t give away). Simon Leys, that wise Belgian Sinologist, critic and novelist, rightly notes, in The Hall of Uselessness, Simenon’s ability to achieve ‘unforgettable effects by ordinary means. His language is poor and bare (like the ...”