“... never read The Road to Oxiana,’ and then telling us his opinion of it, in a recent review of Paul Fussell’s Abroad.By an amiable irony, the same issue of the Spectator which contains Ingrams’s announced intention not to read Amis’s novels also contains a page of reflections ‘On book reviewing’ by, wait for it, Christopher Booker. He discusses ...”

“... got the memo. ‘The BBC,’ she complained in a letter to the then minister of health, Kenneth Robinson, ‘are determined to do everything in their power to present promiscuity as normal.’Up the Junction, based on a book by Nell Dunn, was the first collaboration between Ken Loach, who joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, and Tony Garnett, who ...”

“... Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a mystery, and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on ...”

“... the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help enjoying the ...”

“... Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of flowery autobiographical pensées.) She also bagged the ...”

“... find her presiding over the counters of the smarter shops – Marshall and Snelgrove, Matthias Robinson or, in my aunties’ case, Manfield’s Shoe Shop and White’s Ladies Gowns. The Davis manner, bored, sceptical, sarcastic, was particularly effective when ‘chalking people off’, as Mam called it. It was something she never had enough ...”

“... probably started the rot and then there was Glyn Daniel and his bow ties and today it’s Tony Robinson capering about professing huge excitement because of the uncovering of the (entirely predictable) foundations of a Benedictine priory at Coventry. His enthusiasm is anything but infectious and almost reconciles one to the bulldozer. And there’s always ...”

“... an editorial/reviewing slot, ‘Le Salon de lecture’, where he wrote about La Conspiration by Paul Nizan, and two works of fiction – La Nausée and Le Mur – by Sartre. The pieces on Nizan and Sartre are often quoted, unlike his review of La Pasionaria’s speeches and writings (not ‘a great book’ despite the ‘unforgettable’ voice of a ‘lucid ...”

“... one day, he would preach the next. Towards the end of his sentence, the Bedfordshire justices sent Paul Cobb, a clerk of the peace, to obtain Bunyan’s submission. Had Bunyan been willing to sue for pardon and to admit that he had wrongfully convened the meeting at Lower Samsell, he would have been freed, but he refused. Bunyan told Cobb he was willing to ...”

“... Guiana who could shave himself as well as roll and light cigarettes using only his mouth. Pete Robinson was a 65-pound ‘human skeleton’. Olga Roderick … was a traditional bearded lady, and Koo Koo (‘the bird girl from Mars’) appeared to be the victim of progeria, a rare disease that causes rapid and premature ageing.As Browning assembled his ...”

“... and he often succeeded. His closest colleagues from his time at the Treasury, including Geoffrey Robinson, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, remained remarkably loyal. But there was​ , inevitably, a downside. The higher he rose, the more political these friendships became. Being part of Gordon’s band was not a costless enterprise – it deeply alienated the ...”

“... towards nuisance visitors. Taylor is proud of the response to the shaft by previous outsiders: Paul Whitehouse (‘One of those two fishermen’) is making a solo television series. He was taken to Greenwich, where he found the tunnels ‘awesome’. Three generations of Bazalgettes came down at the weekend, along with journalists from the Evening ...”

“... though the audience could choose to bury you at any moment’. She summoned up a quote from Paul Celan: ‘There was earth inside them, and they dug.’ Chiara Ambrosio, like many others calibrating the difficulty of existence in an increasingly pressured environment, where substantial memory traces are redacted and the surface of things is revamped on ...”

“... embracing anti-scientific irrationalism. One way of telling this story – adopted by Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel Forty Signs of Rain – begins with the Scientists for Johnson Campaign, run by a group of eminent scientists who were worried about Barry Goldwater’s apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and ...”

“... in the town in 1946. I knew some of these people: Dan Bolger, for example, whose grandfather, Paul, had donated money in 1846. Dan Bolger had a shop in the town. It was hard to think of him, or any of these people, having grandparents who knew ‘bitter hunger, starvation and death’. Most of them had inherited property and exuded a certain ...”