“... Few writers can claim to have quite literally saved their own lives through writing. In the second volume of her autobiography, Janet Frame describes how she was rescued from the leucotomy then fashionable in New Zealand mental hospitals by attracting the attention of the superintendent. Her first volume of short stories, The Lagoon, had won the Hubert Church Award, the first of many literary prizes which she was to receive in her climb to an international reputation (one, it should be said, which has always flourished in the USA rather than England ...”

“... On 22 June​ 1922, the doors of Liverpool Street Station were closed for an hour to all but invited guests. Flags on the roof were set at half-mast while a ceremony took place to commemorate the men from the Great Eastern Railway Company who had died in the First World War. The guest of honour was Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, who unveiled a memorial in the station’s booking hall ...”

“... Edward St Aubyn began writing his Patrick Melrose novels in 1988. He finished At Last, the fifth and supposedly final book in the series, late in 2010. St Aubyn is a terrific prose stylist and, end to end, these 800 or so pages, covering more than 40 years, add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war – Dance to the Music of Time or Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour ...”

“... It is almost impossible to say anything completely correct about London; and it is equally difficult to say anything entirely erroneous. Whatever is written about a town so vast and varied, whether by city residents, provincial visitors or foreign observers, is likely to be at least and at best partially valid, which may explain why the literature on London is so lush ...”

“... As the 19th century turned into the 20th, the English press was diverse and vigorous. Apart from the Times, whose threepenny price marked it as the newspaper of record for the ruling class, London had a clutch of what were conveniently known as penny papers. On one side were the Tory Morning Post, Daily Telegraph and Standard, on the other, the Liberal Daily News and Daily Chronicle, surviving or even thriving on circulations well under 50,000 ...”

“... In March​ 1957 Brian O’Nolan – better known under his pen names Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen – then aged 45, applied for a series of jobs at the radio broadcasting studios in Cork, including station supervisor, programme assistant, and balance and control officer. The same month he announced his candidacy for the Irish Senate. His principal argument in his own favour was that he was truly independent of the two main parties, which were still floundering about in the ‘detritus’ of the civil war ...”

“... My worthiest ancestor, who in 1780 saved London from desolation – as I like to think – by ordering his redcoat militia to fire on the mob in the Gordon Riots, had another claim to notice. As a sheriff of London, Sir Barnard Turner was instrumental in abolishing Tyburn as a place of execution. In so doing he ended the tumultuous turnout of ruffians, whores and honest citizens who cheered, or execrated, the deathcart on its way from Newgate along Tyburn Road, now Oxford Street, to the gallows ground now known as Marble Arch ...”

“... Christopher Ricks’s new book makes available many of his distinguished lectures given in the Eighties and Nineties. The essays retain a sense of occasion, and of a star performance on Ricks’s part, while the book has been designed with the aggressive sobriety that signals a class act. Presumably it was the author who decreed that the title, in defiance of commercial logic, should give no clue to the contents, and who dispensed with routine enticements such as a subtitle and Preface, so that there’s no short-cut to finding what the book is about ...”

“... Philip Larkin​ claimed that sexual intercourse began in 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. A better (if rhyme-busting) bet might have been 1965, when BBC One broadcast Up the Junction, a riotous group portrait of women at work in a Battersea chocolate factory and on the pull in Clapham, in its Wednesday Play slot ...”

“... On a walking tour in 1866, just before his conversion, Hopkins visited Tintern Abbey, and paid it the highest compliment he could think of by saying it reminded him of the architecture of Butterfield, designer of Keble College. When we say X has no sense of humour it means he has one different from our own, but Hopkins’s idea of fun is very Victorian, very religious, very remote indeed ...”

“... What nationalism is, and how it came to exist, are topics of some significance today. One reason for this is practical: that a suitable answer to these questions would justify some states, sure of their own right to nationalism, in suppressing national claims by minority or neighbour populations. There are other, more intellectually respectable, reasons ...”

“... Is there anyone​ nowadays who boasts a sure understanding of the laws and practices of the British constitution? Who today extols the ‘matchless constitution’? It was commonly accepted not so long ago – and not only by the British – that while Western civilisation had drawn its religious beliefs from the Middle East, its mathematical knowledge from the Arabs, its artistic sensibility from the Greeks and its laws from the Romans, it was from the British that it had derived the arts of political organisation ...”

“... The​ appearance within a few months of each other of two books about the same four women is a bit startling, but on reflection the topic is so natural and interesting that one might even wonder why it hasn’t been treated before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s ...”

“... Aweek​ before Christmas in 2010, a young woman called Joanna Yeates disappeared from her home in Bristol. I remember first hearing about it on the car radio, my attention snagged, as it always is when Bristol is on the news, because that’s where I went to school. The fact that Bristol is a big place has never prevented me thinking I know it well, but it was when the reporter mentioned Clifton that I was reeled in ...”

“... The great thing to be determined was whether there was a Call from God or not.’ So wrote a missionary about his move to Australia in the 1880s. It is not a view expressed in that mysterious body of argument, migration theory, and this fact is a useful reminder of the limitations of that doctrine, which ranges from the fatuous to the sophisticated, but holds entirely to secular motivation ...”