“... Perceptively, Professor Gilbert stresses that the background was not Wales tout court, but rural North Wales. Political leaders who are connected with a particular group are apt to dramatise their identification with it: they are too like actors to resist making the most of any fat part in which the celestial director has cast them. Flamboyantly as Disraeli ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... composition and demoralising failure of Tender is the night; Zelda’s institutionalisation in North Carolina and the attempted resuscitation of his career by means of a scriptwriting stint in Hollywood; the affair with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who helped him climb back on the wagon and encouraged his return to novel-writing with the ...”

“... of Roth’s writing.Joseph Roth was born Moses Joseph Roth, in 1894, in the small town of Brody, north-east of Lvov, in what was then Austria-Hungary, and is now the Ukrainian Socialist Republic of the USSR. He grew up with his mother, supported by his uncles, and in 1913 went to Vienna to study German. Initially a pacifist, he joined up in 1916 and served ...”

“... the society portraitist. Painted in 1786, it shows Polier at home with his friends Claude Martin, John Wombwell, the paymaster to the Company’s troops, and, in the background, with his head turned towards the viewer and painting another picture, Zoffany himself. Although Polier affects a long, drooping ‘Indian’ moustache and wears a turban, his ...”

“... it showed how weak political Britishness has become. The old gap in attitudes between the North of England and the wealthy, pampered South-East is widening. As for the future of the Anglo-Scottish Union, the difficulty is to find anyone who cares strongly about it, especially south of the border. Once, the Union seemed a mighty pillar supporting ...”

“... the national media lose interest the local papers will start. Already the Journal is ringing round North-East MPs asking us to volunteer our expense claims, so they can trawl through them at leisure, picking us off one by one. 13 May. Payback time. A bidding war has broken out between the main parties to see who can display more repentance. Cameron (who has ...”

“... of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing ...”

“... landscapes and accompanying social milieux. Simenon captures the eerie flatness of the industrial north-east, the bitter cold and huddled indoor life of Breton fishing villages, the suffocated propriety of Vichy, the bright louche life of Mediterranean France. There is also, and it’s a chief glory of the books, a whole range of different Parises, from the ...”

“... Octagon Theatre. One chain of events focuses on the Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, Mr John Stalker, who was recently suspended for three months during an internal disciplinary investigation and subsequently reinstated by the lay Police Authority, despite the evident willingness of his senior colleagues to have him face a tribunal. The other ...”

“... Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the grandness of the occasion with a score that incorporated ...”

“... black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’ ‘Evil’? ‘Wickedness’? The ability to employ these terms without awkwardness or embarrassment has declined, while the capacity of modern statesmen to live up to them has undergone an exponential rise since Lord Macaulay so crisply ...”

“... surveillance helicopters take off, is closer still to Matthew Allen’s High Beach Asylum where John Clare, distracted by agricultural enclosures, was lodged. But it was the launcher site in Oxleas Wood, where locals had fought hard (and successfully) against motorway incursions, that I wanted to inspect. Leaning on his stick, Steve was waiting at ...”

“... Davis specialises in. ‘He’ll be back,’ she insists. He won’t, or not in that way. He goes north and marries someone else. When he does return, Julie is delighted, and practises her apologies. She is the last person to learn the truth of the situation, and actually does apologise, very gracefully, in a white dress, before she finds out what’s really ...”

“... An early one, the National Gallery Baptism of Christ, is dominated by just such naked figures – John and Christ. They are not shown, however, in a corner of classical Tuscany but set against a scene of North European forest and mountains – a landscape like a stage backdrop. The backdrop shares none of the light which ...”