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“... of Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, including, a few weeks ago, our current island governor John Major. The BBC’s (by now rather crowded) island retreat both affirms and denies the insular character of Britain itself: once there, you would have the advantages of an island without the British climate and the rest of the British people. The Prime ...”

“... what the devil to make of this music, and most of us were frank enough to say so’, as the critic John Runciman put it – an attitude that no doubt contributed to the perception that Delius’s music was formless.Delius spent so much of his life abroad that the British context offers only a partial perspective. As a child he taught himself piano, having had ...”

“... practices of another. In the mosque’s main hall of worship stand the tombs of Abraham, Jacob and Rebecca, sacred to Jews and Muslims. Before 1967 a small rabbinical school, located at the back of the mosque, had been unused for generations: after 1967 the Israelis reopened it, built a library there, and re-excavated some more Old Testament tombs (those of ...”

“... cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his ...”

“... make it cosy. In the run-up to the Munich Agreement, the drama critic Alexander Woollcott wrote to Rebecca West that he had the ‘impression from a fairly faithful reading of Dorothy Thompson in the Herald Tribune that she may sail at any minute in order to strangle Neville Chamberlain’.After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, opinion pollsters asked Americans ...”

“... this deadpan claim to literary originality: Swift lifted these words from the Restoration poet Sir John Denham’s praise of Abraham Cowley: ‘To him no author was unknown,/Yet what he wrote was all his own.’ As it happens, it was Cowley’s rhapsodic style Swift began his career by imitating, so that (he bragged to a cousin in 1692) ‘when I writt what ...”

“... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...”

“... Literally. I had been thinking about it hard and wrote my first article, off my own bat, about Rebecca. It was fuelled by an old-fashioned indignation. I was furious at the Marxist critics I was reading who called romance readers ‘dupes’ and saw their longings as false consciousness. Romance, I argued, not quite pontificating, was always a sign of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his children. During a period in England, he introduced them to the likes of Carlyle, Tennyson and John Stuart Mill. He expressed himself in a characteristically Jamesian way: ‘I will not attempt to state the year in which I was born, because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with saying instead, that the earliest event of my ...”

“... its mass media, sometimes at the expense of its idea of nationality. On the eve of World War Two, John Reith believed passionately in radio broadcasting as an extension of national culture, but was outmanoeuvred by the audience’s delight in ‘knob-twiddling’. By 1935, there were 7.4 million radio licences in the United Kingdom, but not all radios were ...”

“... often indulged friends or relatives. (Play It as It Lays was scripted by Dominick’s brother, John Gregory Dunne, and his wife, Joan Didion, and was an adaptation of Didion’s warning novel on Hollywood.) But he threw parties, and for a few years real class people came, and he took their pictures. He hadn’t set out to be a studied photographer, but he ...”

“... by the A-listed Alfred Hitchcock, by then responsible for huge and glossy Hollywood hits like Rebecca, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest. He was at the end of his contract with Universal, who were either not taken with the subject or disappointed by Hitchcock’s projected style for the film, so he produced it with his own company, Shamley, and ...”

“... that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly prepared for the stage. As the manager and ...”

“... had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to having her picture taken and her reluctance to submit to interviews (she believed that readers should ‘keep their illusions’ about ...”