“... from a very different direction. The Royal Court articulated the anguish and exclusion of, in Kenneth Tynan’s words, ‘the non-U intelligentsia who live in bedsitters and divide the Sunday papers into two groups, “posh” and “wet”’; Stratford East celebrated the festive energy of the put-upon and the oppressed, for whom the Sunday papers meant ...”

“... film addresses the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 and – perhaps more obliquely – Kenneth Branagh’s film engages with the current carnage of Belfast.In the 18th century an early shift of emphasis from performance to print led to Shakespeare’s becoming irrevocably woven into the strands of a national literary culture, first through ...”

“... but that is the case with almost all the contributors with good poems included here – Hugo Williams, Anne Stevenson, Carol Rumens, Andrew Motion. The exceptions, who compose naturally in a more spacious sequence, are James Fenton and of course Seamus Heaney himself. Heaney, in collaboration with Ted Hughes, has produced a most agreeable ...”

“... has to go to the really best poems of our time to find writing with as much skill,’ Kenneth Koch claimed in his review. ‘Mr Schuyler has transferred the excitements of poetry to his prose; something (witty or prosodic) is happening at every second … his language makes one aware not only of what it describes, but also of language itself ...”

“... The few who didn’t – the usual crew of Betjeman, Waugh, Lancaster, a Mitford or two and even Kenneth Clark – were regarded as frivolous self-advertisers playing at perversity. What had been a far from straightforward face-off between propagandists for diverse forms of classicism and, on the other side, god’s own warrior-goths, was exhumed as a ...”

“... The exhibition had been sponsored by the Observer, at that time peopled with fabled beings like Kenneth Tynan, Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee ...”

“... life. Tolkien was not a man who admired much that had been written after Chaucer, but he did like Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). The Hobbit, and the hobbit, fit easily into that gentle, don’t-forget-your-galoshes world.The hobbit was Bilbo Baggins, a member of a small, sturdy, rather conventional species of humanoid, with furry feet, a ...”

“... sort of busy bee.I’m not suggesting you were some foppish, would-be West End theatre figure like Kenneth Tynan. When you started ‘Tomorrow’, though, you must already have had a group of collaborators and contributors you could nobble for the next issue.I’d enjoyed bringing out the Scorpion and had always remembered it. Then I met a Sri Lankan, Susil ...”

“... Eva Le Gallienne, Katharine Cornell, Ona Munson, Teddie Gerard, Tallulah Bankhead and Hope Williams; the rakish lesbian salonnière Natalie Barney; Dolly Wilde (Oscar’s opium-addicted niece); Marie Laurencin, painter and friend of Picasso; the Ballets Russes dancer Tamara Karsavina; the photographer Berenice Abbott; modernist designer Eileen ...”

“... then, too, there are all my mood-setting ‘highbrow’ CDs – the songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi’s ‘Only a Man Harrowing Clods’ to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an ...”

“... Scrutiny Committee on 18 January 2018.‘That sounds like a lot of money,’ the Washington lawyer Kenneth Feinberg said when I called him, ‘but it’s not really.’ Feinberg was the formal administrator of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, and he did the same job after the Boston Marathon bombing and after the mass shooting at a cinema in ...”