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“... old photograph, are much less capable, and can be merely sentimental. Duncan Forbes also has some light and comical poems, ‘Fatso and Spotty’ and ‘Politics of Envy’ (about the ‘Jackdaw folder of “Historical Genitalia” ’) particularly so. His serious vein is concise, and if not macabre then bleak and heavy with mortality. He uses interesting ...”

“... or the disreputable. I envisaged a series of events I took to be wildly implausible, but in the light of recent developments they turn out to be almost tame. I read for instance that the video guide to the National Trust house at Hughenden, once lived in by Disraeli, is voiced by Jeffrey Archer, euphemistically described by the Trust as a ‘provocative ...”

“... in his life came to an end with his portrayal of Lord Raglan in Tony Richardson’s Charge of the Light Brigade in 1967, and then his success in Forty Years On the following year. It was certainly clear from Richardson’s film that Gielgud was beginning to act in a different way. Indeed, he was hardly acting at all, allowing much more of his own personality ...”

“... many of them rubbish. Today it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The ...”

“... they saw. Even the three children of the Clarks did not mind talking to her. Their eldest son, Alan, was aware that both his parents tended to fantasise about the happy life they had made for their children. Alan was put into a very good school, and like most children of the higher bourgeoisie didn’t see much of his ...”

“... of one Sabbatai Zvi, holy roller, profligate, manic-depressive, loving son, passionate friend, a light never quite to lighten the gentiles, but certainly a light of a fitful and most garish kind. Ms Rubens obviously knows the difference between historical identity and fictional personage, and would not expect her readers ...”

“... the pretext for regicide and terror; and whatever that was, it could emerge clearly only in the light of a contrast with the British character. Though Professor Deane has a lot else to say, his distinctive theme is the various ways in which British thinkers explored the British political character in their obsessive exploration of the French. That this is ...”

“... or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one thing, they cast light on the hopes and fears most of us entertain in the face of government activity of all sorts. Realists who think it a considerable achievement to ‘keep the show on the road’ continue to jostle idealists who wonder why nobody has yet built Jerusalem in ...”

“... as a shovelful of burning coals from the kitchen range is carried smoking through the house to light the fire in the sitting-room before we sit down to high tea in the kitchen. After tea, the sitting-room still smelling of smoke, Aunt Eveline arranges herself on the piano stool and with my father on the violin (‘Now then, Walter, what shall we give ...”

“... the text. It is perhaps unfair, but surely it is realistic, to envisage Blatty’s Legion in the light of the cinematic horror effects which it is destined to inspire. One of these, in particular, is so overwhelmingly disgusting that the very thought of seeing it in colour on the wide screen has to be excluded from the mind. (I will not waste my time, or ...”

“... colours declaring their high Cotswold origins. Fred kept the oak spokes of his wheels narrow and light because the waggons were destined for use in the elevated fields, unlike those made in the Severn Valley, which needed to be fat to resist the riverside mud. Fred turned the hubs out of great lumps of elm, one of the few woods tough enough to withstand the ...”

“... The jacket copy invites comparisons to Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt and Hanya Yanagihara. (Alan Hollinghurst is also present, but the implied comparison seems to be stylistic rather than thematic.) Edward St Aubyn and Karl Ove Knausgaard, with their bad dads, would also have been apt. The critic Sam Sacks has called such books ‘agony novels’, but ...”

“... the same coarsening detectable nowadays when bishops are too much on television. 19 October. Alan Clark and Kenneth Clarke resurrected this lunchtime to comment on the arrest of Pinochet. Both routinely acknowledge Pinochet’s crimes, although Clark A. is careful to refer to them as ‘alleged’, probably because he didn’t actually hear the screams ...”

“... But that defence is much too like the drunk’s defence of looking for his keys under the street light – he knew the keys weren’t there, but at least there was light; rational-choice theories are very illuminating about behaviour that presents few puzzles, and unilluminating about behaviour that presents more. In any ...”

“... the DETR, Prescott blusters and bungles away, the Peter Principle made flesh. Other ministers – Alan Milburn, David Blunkett, Stephen Byers – briefly shoot skywards, flare and fizzle. Through the passing show Mullin is by turns wryly amused and appalled, but often just alienated, a Meursault of the red boxes. Despite his Bennite past, the alienation is ...”