“... in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he complained that Britain was investing in a vision of ...”

“... Among​ the poems Edward Thomas drafted in 1916, shortly before he was posted to France, was ‘As the team’s head-brass’. The poet, seated in the boughs of a fallen elm, watches a ploughman at work ‘narrowing a yellow square/Of charlock’. He exchanges words with him as he pauses at the turn of each furrow, so that the conversational back and forth maps at intervals onto the changing geometry of the field ...”

“... have been canvassed since Eden’s death. The choice for the ‘authorised’ biography is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly ...”

“... in charge. ‘We are not going to hurt anybody,’ Father Michael Dougherty of Lansing, Michigan said. ‘We just want access to this place’ – he pointed north – ‘to Jerusalem.’ From the checkpoint, Jerusalem was a ten-minute drive. A young American marcher urged the soldiers: ‘Come, join us in Jerusalem.’ The older soldier ordered the ...”

“... I really ought to have been writing. Some examples: ‘She had a face like an upturned canoe,’ said by the actor Charles Gray at breakfast in Dundee (though of whom I can’t remember). A. I’ve been salmon fishing. B. It’s not the season. A. No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig ...”

“... a kind of animal innocence, not knowing their own cruelty. An Awfully Big Adventure could be said to relate to both genres. It is remarkable, however, in suggesting some of these mechanisms without making disturbed adolescent girls seem a different species. The production which the events of the story bring to an end is of Peter Pan. In it Stella ...”

“... the adjacent ocean. Those born in a country of such intense heat are mostly black in colour. It is said that they are no different in human nature, being kindly and compassionate.’ This would be an unusually enlightened opinion even today in one of the most racially conscious countries in the world. The public curiosity for foreign exotica, new gadgets and ...”

“... Beaton and his family early in the 19th century. They had rowed in a dory from Prince Edward Island with all their belongings: And they slept under the boat, turned the dory over and slept under it. And when they woke in the morning, there was a little rivulet on the beach, and they started a fire, just underneath the high tall trees, so she ...”

“... Amnesty and the BBC, without much success, in spite of offers of help from local volunteers like Edward Heath. At one point Radji even fantasises about blowing up the BBC transmitter on Masirah Island, off Oman, which carries the World Service to Iran. Radji’s account is an unintended tribute to two often underestimated British institutions: the BBC World ...”

“... Marvell and their cunning ways: they were not Poets Laureate. Who was? Well, the first is usually said to be Ben Jonson, followed by D’Avenant and Dryden, who was given the title officially. Then came Shadwell, Tate, Rowe, Eusden (who celebrated the Duke of Newcastle from whom he received the office and ‘sleeps among the dull of ancient days’ in ...”

“... Lawrence called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both Henry James and T.S. Eliot used the deadly word ‘provincial’. Auden condemned a sentence from ‘William Wilson’ as vague and verbose, and Aldous Huxley summed up Poe as ‘one of Nature’s ...”

“... waters at the thought rather than the thing. A foodie once put a small object into my hand and said with reverence ‘bite that’. I bit as directed and received an impression of nothing, no taste, either good or bad. I commented on this. He beamingly agreed. I had missed the point, which was that he had bought this nugget of smoked mushroom in the market ...”

“... to study Havering make it hard to know what conclusions to draw from the results. Dr McIntosh has said bluntly that it was ‘at no time’ a ‘typical English community’. Until James I started to listen to those who preached retrenchment, the Crown was an exceptionally undemanding landlord. The Crown’s inertia as a landlord is familiar, but Havering had ...”

“... a longing for rescue from what seemed the hopelessness of capitalism. There were those, like Edward Upward, who believed (and, I think, believe) that Communism was never even tried, that the whole of Soviet history is a monstrous deviation, its extent marked by the almost unimaginable cruelty of Koba. Amis has tried to render that cruelty ...”

“... 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 agony by itself isn’t usually enough. The third volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle is immersed in the ...”