“... be found ‘on the shelves of dons, the superior type of schoolmaster (the other type has Kipling, Ian Hay and P.G. Wodehouse), and in the average well-to-do home’. Initial reviews of Personal Pleasures – ‘most amusing’, ‘delightful’, ‘an ideal bedside book’ – were along these lines, calculated to please a publisher but suggesting something ...”

“... enjoys. It was arguably a return to the form that best suited her imagination, well described by Ian McEwan as both ‘fastidious and sensual’, by giving it constraints to work against. For Carter ‘the really important thing’ was narrative, as she said in the introduction to Expletives Deleted, a collection of essays and reviews which appeared just ...”

“... then called the Harrow Free Grammar School in 1615, with the vicar’s son as his first pupil, to Ian Beer, the last Head but one, who retired in 1991. A few emerge as hopelessly inadequate to the task of running a school of any type (like the unfortunate Wordsworth, who presided over ‘moderate anarchy’ until the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, came to the ...”

“... Woman.15 April. Watch five minutes of Have I Got News for You with Nigel Farage the guest and Ian Hislop and Paul Merton their usual genial selves. I never quite understand why they are happy to sit on a panel with the likes of Farage, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Clarkson et al. Their reasoning would, I imagine, be that this gives them the opportunity to have ...”

“... the cables buried beneath the unsuspecting ground. Dick File’s Weather Watch, with foreword by Ian McCaskill (who, according to Bill Giles, broadcasts in his bare feet), is a no-nonsense trot in teasingly accessible segments through the excitements of the British weather: carbon dioxide ‘sinks’, Chaos Theory, incentives for reducing emissions. The book ...”

“... for awfulness. The idea that Mrs Thatcher might think Britain should become self-sufficient in wood is the novel’s only implausible flight of fancy, and it is imaginatively a good one. The image of the British countryside replaced by conifer plantations conveys the banality of Thatcherism and its meanness of spirit, and it lends the novel a touch of ...”

“... of ordinary doctors that their academic colleagues regard them as nothing more than hewers of wood. All this means that the academic-NHS interface must be actively managed: historically, and in the majority of institutions, it has not been. I know from personal experience that when the statutory liaison committees have their infrequent meetings the main ...”

“... have been impossible for Hansel and Gretel to walk more than four miles through any English wood in any direction without bursting back out into open fields.’ I like facts like this, and The Child that Books Built is full of them. It also contains an impressive variety of loosely connected arguments, as well as plenty of well-told anecdotes. There is ...”

“... by others. In Glasgow, John Robertson made the engine and David Napier the boiler, while John Wood in Port Glasgow built the wooden hull and installed the machinery. The result was a marvel, the prototype of a steamer fleet that would revolutionise travel on the Clyde by 1820, when two dozen of them sailed every day except Sunday to previously hard to ...”

“... boundaries, Labour shut its party office in town. Deirdre thinks that the local Labour MP, Ian Lavery, is too wary of encountering hostile locals. She feels isolated. ‘Every Sunday night, when we go to town and have a game of bingo in the club, and people are always having a go, you know, here’s the Labour Party coming. You know, this ...”

“... to fill in the spaces. The tone of it reminds me of the tone of Lowell’s conversation with Ian Hamilton from 1971, mechanically clever but distant and deaf, all denatured one-liners and musing rhetorical questions. It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie ...”

“... a robbery at the London Electricity Board in Ilford was unsafe. New graffiti tell the world that Ian Tomlinson, an unfortunate pedestrian caught up in the G20 protests in the City, was murdered by the police. The calligraphy is elegant, the punctuation emphatic. A strange and rather Ackroydian incident occurred as I walked past the railings of St John the ...”

“... players, your caddie will do the rearranging for you – a method also adopted, incidentally, by Ian Fleming’s orange-complexioned bullion fetishist Auric Goldfinger. Reilly also provides ample testimony to Trump’s habit of awarding himself a gimme, in defiance of strict protocol, whenever confronted by a putt he thinks he might miss. This is a sport ...”

“... relish in his plain statement of fact. ‘London was, but is no more.’ It reminds me of hearing Ian Holloway, the manager of Queen’s Park Rangers, on the radio. He’s got a nice West Country burr, very soothing for his employers. He was talking about his club’s horrible run of form when he said, with disarming optimism, ‘I think we’re right on the ...”

“... tears. The first was when he shot a heron which had been attacking the fish in the moat at Salt-wood Castle. The second was on the occasion of a ‘Bloomsbury evening at Saltwood. We entertained the “Friends of Charleston”.’ Clark stuffed the Garden House with Bloomsbury ‘items’ and in the Great Library there was a performance by Eileen Atkins of ...”