“... they left almost half a century ago? Israeli historians like Benny Morris, Israeli authors like David Grossman and Amos Oz, have written eloquently of their catastrophe. But in 1950, the Israeli government passed the Absentee Property Law which still forbids Selma Tawil and the other 750,000 Palestinians from ever returning – if they left their homes in ...”

“... as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was by then at work on, Mays outlined in a 1996 lecture what he meant by his title, ‘Coleridge’s ...”

“... just stop playing around with your silly bombs,’ to coincide with a visit in 1995 by the French president, who had just announced a series of nuclear tests. In July 2015, I was present at a shambolic performance – he was 63 and appeared to be suffering from sciatica – in what can’t have been his first farewell tour. Undeterred by the six ...”

“... for monumental mockery (‘This England’), the obituary which said plummily: ‘Any sketch of David Glass’s work would be incomplete without reference to his amour propre, the history of his subject.’ Over in America, I miss the Times obituaries more than anything else from the English public prints. The USA has no counterpart. The New York Times ...”

“... do ‘the paperwork’. Meryl Streep spoke glowingly of sticking to the text when they filmed The French Lieutenant’s Woman from Harold Pinter’s script. I first came across the problem in Bangkok when the American actor Fred Forrest would spend the evenings laboriously changing David Hare’s dialogue for Saigon, Year ...”

“... case of a good reader, make better readings possible. Thus it is with the most perceptive of the French narrative analysts, Gérard Genette. He uses Proust as a reservoir of illustrations for his narrative poetics: but he also uses that poetics as a set of instruments for giving ‘a more precise description of Proustian narrative in its ...”

“... in July 1956. Irving compares the Writers Union with the Encyclopaedists’ preparation of the French Revolution, and eulogises the writer Julius Häy’s tours of the provinces – only to comment: ‘their contact with the real proletariat was a harrowing experience for intellectuals.’ When the action starts, the Circle is condemned as ‘trying to ...”

“... view that Glasgow in the 1740s was ‘far behind’ in ‘taste’, with ‘neither a teacher of French nor of music in the town’, Crawford suddenly soars with great style, wielding his pen like the sword of truth over the heads of these self-satisfied popinjays. ‘Glasgow,’ he writes, ‘for this East Coast writer, could be summed up in the phrase ...”

“... with wartime controls was an aberration. (Wartime America was much less obedient.) Cartoon by David Langdon for ‘Punch’, November 1949. Mark Roodhouse’s answer to the crude question of just how much black market activity there was in Britain, both during the war and in the period of postwar austerity, is that, though widespread, it was far less so ...”

“... lecturer, who, along with a significant number of radicals, later fell in with the Russophobe, David Urquhart, and like most of Urquhart’s followers, became a devotee of the Turkish bath. (The mania for hydropathy or water-cures is a little-known coda to Chartism, and worthy of further study.) Included, too, is Joseph Barker, another Methodist ...”

“... John Donne, and was seized upon by a readership anxious to stress the degeneracy of their own age. David Jones, an autochthonous Welsh, rather than Anglo-American, modernist of Poundian tendencies, offers another poet’s version of Johnson’s aperçu in his preface to the Anathemata (1952), and claims the Metaphysicals for Wales at the same time. Jones is ...”

“... preoccupations and tastes. In her straining after the essence of things, she reminds one of David Malouf and of Bruce Chatwin (who married into her clan). I don’t mean that she copies them: she is too committed, too intense for that; an element of what an American reviewer called ‘self-administered therapy’ convinces one that she is too seriously ...”

“... in Westminster, as against 630 in the Italian Chamber, 622 in the German Bundestag and 577 in the French Assembly. There are also 734 members of the House of Lords, as compared with the 343 members of the French Senate, the 315 of the Italian Senate and the 69 of the German Bundesrat. The UK also has generously provisioned ...”

“... and provide the skills base needed by modern industry and commerce.’ To say nothing of Sir David Philips, Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, who remarked in 1988 that ‘decisions by the Government were “progressively leading to an unstable situation”.’ Fighting words, no doubt, but they have the unmistakably musty smell of ...”

“... was to be frightfully smart and West End, wear beautifully-cut suits lounging on sofas in French-window comedies’. Fifty years later ‘I was asked to put suppositories up my bottom under the bedclothes and play a scene in the lavatory which I confess I found somewhat intimate.’ Knighthoods nothing: actors should be decorated for gallantry. This ...”