“... nobody reads it anyway. But one surprises within oneself the church-going urge to be more serious. Alan Bennett’s piece on W.H. Auden, which seemed so good when it appeared in the paper, seems better still reprinted. For this, the justly famous Bennett can have got no royalties, no curtain calls, no green-rooms cries of ‘Darling!’ His reward was the ...”

“... that is blazingly radical. Well, once again, you could argue that myth has overtaken reality. As Alan Plater points out, Jimmy Porter is far from being a working-class hero. By trade, he is a very small shopkeeper (he runs a sweet stall). When he isn’t enjoying himself slumming around with Cliff, he’s berating the workers for being noisy at the ...”

“... balance’.                                          Alan Halsey To make a true difference, ascertain the turning point just prior to the terrain itself. Wefting and proof of particularised elements, panegyric as oscular traces, the trim sensor convinced. Aaron Williamson But before we can even embark on this ...”

“... or perhaps it’s the other way round. Elsewhere Auden quotes from one of his touchstones, Charles Williams, who writes of overwhelming yet undefinable moments, those in which ‘a hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from the train is the rock of all existence.’ From the start, the Auden effect was an odd blend of the ...”

“... imaginary had better be called traffic, he quotes, to wonderful effect, a passage of Raymond Williams from The Country and the City: Traffic is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness and a form of social relations … It is impossible to read the early descriptions of crowded metropolitan streets – the people as isolated atoms, flowing ...”

“... It was chaired by Victor Rothschild and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted that the law ...”

“... who was interested in a much looser, open style, as well as other Americans such as William Carlos Williams. Wavering between systems, Gunn didn’t please everyone. In August Kleinzahler’s introduction to the third Selected, which appeared in 2007 (the second came in 1979), Kleinzahler quoted two anthologists on the decline of Gunn. The first was ...”

“... sensational trial of tax fraud and conspiracy. His attorney, the no less legendary Edward Bennett Williams (known as ‘the man to see’), was in effect sending him off on a cruise while he played out the appeals procedure. Confronted with this gargoyle of the old gang, many of the Rhodes boys kept a fastidious distance. ‘But Clinton was there,’ in one ...”

“... a date. But most of us would take the question in the ironic, slightly postmodern way Gwyn Alf Williams intended in calling his best book When Was Wales? If European enthusiasts see a Golden Age in the continent’s past, a moment of definition from which all subsequent history has been a decline, what contemporary political needs edged them into such a ...”

“... an appearance on Aspel and Company, the ITV chat show hosted by Michael Aspel, one of a handful of Alan Partridgesque men who for decades had a monopoly on interviewing film stars on British TV. Taylor had recently completed her second stint at the Betty Ford Centre, where she was treated for alcoholism and other addictions and where she met her seventh and ...”

“... first time out of the box,’ he said, ‘the Grammy, the Emmy, the Tony, the Oscar.’ Tennessee Williams wrote that ‘a giddy God … endowed her with an instrument that even she does not fully understand,’ and Pauline Kael took every opportunity to lionise her ‘protean, volatile talent’. At the end of her first gig in Los Angeles, at the Cocoanut ...”

“... fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule most impressively, reaching the end of the alphabet with the four volumes ...”

“... to have right slap next to the head of Facebook boasting about the absence of fraud. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter and founder of the long-read specialist Medium, found the same post by Zuckerberg next to a different fake ESPN story and another piece of fake news purporting to be from CNN, announcing that Congress had disqualified Trump from ...”

“... Notting Hill, in a rooming-house in Bedford Gardens, just off Kensington Church Street. My friend Alan worked for a travel company and their office was just round the corner. It was a different London then. Notting Hill was still a place of independent pubs and bookshops, and it had more danger and less of the gentility featured in the film Notting ...”