“... the same passport round here. There were forty to fifty people. Seven hundred cheered a drunken [James] Dickey some months before. I didn’t go to the reception.McGahern was amused by many things and people. There was no telephone in the house in Leitrim on my first visit (‘I’m uneasy on the phone,’ he wrote in 1998. ‘I think it comes from having to ...”

“... separate speeches. The King is ordering Hubert to dispose of the young Prince Arthur: ‘Death./My lord?/A grave./He shall not live.’ And the Bastard Falconbridge is, interestingly, given the job of deflating pretension and excess of much the same kind I’ve illustrated. Soon it will be heard no more. However, the truly vital change was to come later. It ...”

“... they passed for brother and sister; and when Pharaoh took the fair Sarai into his house, ‘the Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai Abram’s wife’ (Genesis 12:17). What this parallel means isn’t clear – it makes most sense as an ironic way of registering the difference between modernity and biblical antiquity ...”

“... names,’ Amis confides at one point, ‘it’s amazing how it lowers . . . the tone’ (Lord David ‘Cess-hole’, for example). Getting the tone down to sewer-level became an end in itself, with much verbal japing along the way: ‘Fucky Nell’, ‘a bit of an R-scrawler’ and so on. Above all, the Amis-Larkin correspondence was an abattoir ...”

“... Kenneth Jones, the trial judge, had suggested 12 years for McCluskie and his co-defendant. The Lord Chief Justice thought that nine to ten ‘would not be inappropriate’, but the then Home Secretary overruled the senior judge and agreed with Jones. The Home Secretary’s powers in these kinds of case derive from the Children and Young Persons Act of ...”

“... a supposedly neutral Ireland during the Second World War, fully reported to the British Cabinet by Lord Cranborne in February 1945, which included provision for British command of both Irish and British forces in the event of a German invasion.) Among these papers there are a number of reports from two envoys of the Dáil to Irish America in 1922, Professor ...”

“... from producers and strand editors to the controller and five commissioners. In the same period, James Boyle, Radio Four’s controller, had undertaken the dangerous procedure of restructuring his channel’s slots, which reduced the weekly 90-minute play to 60 minutes (at the same time moving it from Monday to Friday) and rationalised the daytime drama ...”

“... of Parliamentary allegiances brought about by the war Pitt had sided with Fox against the King and Lord North. This so rankled with George III that he would not leave the subject alone, to the extent that when at the King’s request Pitt formed a ministry in 1784 he made it a condition the King would not mention America. So when, at the outset of his ...”

“... set up as the result of an initiative by the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, James Prior. The following year, Adams, already an Assembly member, became MP for West Belfast (he held the seat in 1987 before losing it to the SDLP in 1992). At the same time, Adams, McGuinness and other Northerners displaced the Party’s old leadership in ...”

“... the celebrated ‘St Michan’s mummies’, 60 years ago, I already knew of the church from M.R. James, whose tales of supernatural terror entirely possessed my nine-year-old imagination. We entered the crypt, and it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or ...”

“... your thought’. She is delighted to accept. This is joltingly hard to read today – even P.D. James, no slave to political correctness, calls it ‘blatant misogyny’. It goes a long way to ruining what is otherwise a prime example of golden age detective fiction. Sayers gets into similar difficulties with the character of Harriet Vane, who is unmarried ...”

“... his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and empress of India’), Churchill (1874-1965, ‘prime ...”

“... in this brief and (as it may seem) tub-thumping piece of perhaps 1844. Whether Admiral Lord Nelson deserved such accolades is a question that belongs in another universe of discourse; what matters for poetics is the momentous proof that off-rhyme can supply a more satisfying closure than full rhyme could. This was one Victorian who could speak to ...”

“... Hardly any good poems came out of the conflict in Vietnam and most of those were written by James Fenton, a poet alert to the eerie surrealism of war. What happens when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less ...”

“... squeezed out of them: in the theatre they provide the vehicles for self-seeking actors, ambitious Lord Chamberlains and profiteers out to make money from evening entertainments. They’re plundered and castrated; so they survive ... A rigid cult would be dangerous, like the ceremonial which forbade Byzantine courtiers to touch the persons of the nobility, so ...”