“... no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings ... At its ...”

“... the poetry; when she does, it is conditional analysis, done with care. There is a prose account in Nicholas Sander’s gleefully slanderous The Origins and Progress of an Anglican Schism, published in 1585, a text which suggests that Anne Boleyn was Henry’s own daughter. It also states that on seeing Henry prepare for marriage Wyatt panicked at the thought ...”

“... bungles away, the Peter Principle made flesh. Other ministers – Alan Milburn, David Blunkett, Stephen Byers – briefly shoot skywards, flare and fizzle. Through the passing show Mullin is by turns wryly amused and appalled, but often just alienated, a Meursault of the red boxes. Despite his Bennite past, the alienation is not mainly ideological. Mullin ...”

“... and country clay. The poet wrote until his dying day. The final nail in the coffin came from Stephen Spender, Day Lewis’s old friend and longest surviving hydra head of Roy Campbell’s monstrous ‘MacSpaunday’, who admitted, writing in 1992 at the time of the long-awaited publication of Day Lewis’s Complete Poems, that while he admired the ...”

“... tower is ‘a square prism with pyramidal top in the traditional form of the obelisk’. Pelli is Nicholas Hawksmoor reborn, dominating the eastern reaches of London, the rusty, algae-clogged backwaters of the Lea, with hieratic Egyptian quotations. That New Labour pavilion, the Millennium Dome, is presented as a talisman, ‘covered by the largest roof in ...”

“... bother to trail along the track to the pig sty, which is the first set-up of the film – and Nicholas Hytner’s first set-up ever. As always, even on a modest film like ours, the sheer size of the operation depresses: a dozen vans, two or three buses, half-a-dozen caravans, rows of cars and dozens and dozens of people, all of whom have good reason for ...”

“... an awkward triangle (first time as romance comedy, second time as painful farce) with his friends Stephen and Natasha Spender, he proposed marriage almost simultaneously to three different women. Women fought over his remains, his private secretary unsuccessfully contesting the will he had changed so often. The title of his final novel, Playback, could be ...”

“... blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott in Sketches by Boz), and many busy others. Today, workers in British novels are often vague figures, thin on the page and ghosts in society. Alarm clocks, crowded tube trains, horrible ...”

“... with New Labour. The establishment decided to wheel out the chief of defence staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton. Interviewed on 8 November, he confided to a purring Andrew Marr that the army was deeply vexed by Corbyn’s unilateralism, which damaged ‘the credibility of deterrence’. On the same show, Maria Eagle, a PLP sniper with a seat on the front ...”

“... married to the all-powerful Lord Treasurer, Burghley; another sister, Anne, was the wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper. Elizabeth was thus aunt to two of Shakespeare’s most influential contemporaries, Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Francis Bacon. The Cooke sisters were a byword for intelligence and high education. Their family home at Gidea Hall, near ...”

“... supply with cholera. Meanwhile the great game of international politics was played out. Reviewing Nicholas Bethell’s The Palestine Triangle 30 years ago, A.J.P. Taylor said that no Englishman could contemplate the story of the last years of Mandatory Palestine without some sense of shame. And he added, just as truly, that ‘the role of the American ...”

“... was swelling the Catholic population not only of the US but also of England. Catholic priests like Nicholas Wiseman were preaching to huge congregations. In 1850 the pope issued a brief dividing England into 12 bishoprics, under Wiseman as cardinal archbishop of Westminster, and Wiseman responded by proclaiming that England was about to rejoin the Mother ...”

“... but of Bernard Donoghue, Gordon Brown, Helen Liddell, Alistair Campbell and Charlie Whelan. Stephen Byers and Robinson are currently trying to prevent the sale of Bower’s book, but one would like to hear how others mentioned here respond. Of course, Labour sleaze is nothing new, though it did not, in Attlee’s day, get anywhere near the top. Ever ...”

“... the deportation and murder of half a million Hungarian Jews.So how, in the words of the historian Nicholas Mulder, did ‘the revolutionaries of 1989 become the nativists of the 2010s and 2020s’? For Szelényi, Orbánism is a utilitarian political project. Its ‘primary aim’ is to support ‘the changing political goals of the Fidesz leader’, whose ...”

“... the Sydenham Boys retreated. As they were running off, a member of their gang, 16-year-old Nicholas Pearton, arrived in the park on his own. Some of the Shanks and Guns chased him and one of them, 16-year-old Dale Green, stabbed Pearton, who’d got as far as the main road on the edge of the park. He staggered into a takeaway, where he died not long ...”