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“... Worn-out, jet-lagged, tied to itineraries, he lost touch with the elemental basics of Glanmore (‘stone, slate … cold water, open hearths’) and felt reduced to ‘the “mask” of S.H.’, a ‘mascot’. The public celebration of his seventieth birthday, he told one of his most trusted correspondents, the historian Eamon Duffy, left him ‘feeling that ...”

“... the clear light, like poetry or freedom’ (‘Oysters’). Foster quotes a letter written to Brian Friel while Field Work was gestating: ‘I don’t want any more doors into the dark: I want a door into the light.’ That aspiration tallies with the purposeful change of direction he noted in the typically self-interrogative speech he delivered in 1995 ...”

“... very quiet passages with booming chords played by both hands in parallel, chunky as blocks of stone.1 He also set Latour’s poetry to music, and the Trois Sarabandes of 1887, Satie’s first suite, were inspired by Latour’s esoteric poem ‘La Perdition’ (‘Suddenly all was revealed and the damned fell/Shrieking and jostling in a whirl ...”

“... Street to record a voiceover (of my own voice) for an episode of Family Guy, the story being that Brian, the dog, has written a play, premiering at Quahog, which ‘all the playwrights’ (i.e. Yasmina Reza, David Mamet and me) duly go and see – and rubbish. They had first of all asked if they could use me as a cartoon character to which I graciously agreed ...”

“... The bigger part of our income comes from subsidies we get for environmental work – keeping the stone walls and fences in order, maintaining stock-proof dykes, burning heather, off-wintering trees.’‘Can’t you make anything from the sheep?’ I asked.‘No,’ he said. ‘We are selling livestock way below the cost of production. Subsidies were ...”

“... the last few years this readerly hesitation has been supplemented by the able scholarship of Brian Vickers, first in the pages of the TLS and then in a book published last year.† Vickers has a double aim: to argue that ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ is simply too bad to be Shakespearean but competent enough to be the work of John Davies of Hereford, a ...”

“... when transcribed to a musical staff. Then there is the curse of arid musicology; and of Rolling Stone-ism, the gonzo rock journalist who thinks he is a rock star. Perhaps worst of all, there is the curse of the rhetoric of social action and ‘revolution’, a faith-based illusion that pop songs clearly manifest social history, or an exaggerated sense of ...”

“... stalled – a phenomenon which none of the books mentions. In one of his novels, Patrick O’Brian has his character Stephen Maturin say: ‘Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?’ Cherie (I’m going to call her that to avoid confusion with the other Blair) has a village reputation which stresses her ambivalent relationship with fame ...”

“... to the margins’. There, pockets of Whig resistance no doubt remain – readers of Lawrence Stone’s correspondence with Russell in the TLS not so long ago might be surprised to learn the field had become so pacific. Yet even Stone has conceded the second part of the victory the revisionists claim. For he, too, has ...”

“... will burrow down as deep and as fast as Ada and Phyllis can carry them. ‘We should leave no stone unturned or unfracked,’ Boris Johnson said, ‘in the cause of keeping the lights on in London.’ The mania​ for boreholes reminded me of a cautionary tale by Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed’. Doyle’s crazed superman ...”

“... reopenarbeit macht freii want a haircutIn the ten days after the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, reopens gyms, spas, hair salons, tattoo parlours and other essential services, confirmed coronavirus cases in the state rise by 42 per cent.Ohio representative Nino Vitale explains why he is opposed to face masks: ‘We’re created in the image and ...”

“... 1991, Bob was admitted to hospital with almost no normal lung tissue left. ‘He weighed just five stone,’ Sue said, ‘and died the kind of death you would not wish on a rabid dog.’ On his last day, Bob asked her if everything was ‘sorted’ financially: ‘I lied and told him we’d be fine, and a few minutes later he died.’ Sue couldn’t face going ...”

“... Philippa Foot in the 1980s! Could things be as bad as all that? ‘Probably not,’ someone called Brian replied.To suggest that a culture of sexism might be disproved by the presence of a few women who are granted exceptional status is, among other things, to show an ignorance of the discipline’s history. (Wittgenstein, Anscombe’s beloved teacher, was ...”

“... he could be counted, by the mid-Eighties, among the select group of academics – Hugh Thomas, Brian Crozier, Norman Stone, Leonard Schapiro and others – lending extra-mural advice and assistance to Mrs Thatcher. Urban’s refreshingly forthright memoir, Diplomacy and Disillusion at the Court of Margaret Thatcher, also ...”

“... has often involved them in liaising between the Loyalist paramilitary UDA, the RUC and the Army. Brian Nelson, a former soldier who became chief of intelligence in the UDA and a British Army double agent, is said to have passed on to his Army handlers the information that the UDA was intending to kill Finucane. RUC sources say this was indeed the case, but ...”