“... most miss the random but well-informed conversations we used to have at the critics’ meetings held every so often in the board room at lunchtime. The hard work was planning the general shape of the pages in the month to come. The easier work was in general chatter, ably moderated by, in my time, Roger Alton and then Helen Oldfield. Does anyone know ...”

“... with the vasty deep. By 1404, English authority throughout Wales was in tatters. Glyn Dŵr held his first parliament in May and not only explored alliances with Scotland and Ireland, but sent diplomatic missions urgently to France. Within two months a Franco-Welsh Treaty was signed. In 1405 a French force landed at Milford Haven and, combining with ...”

“... the words of the statute say less than they appeared to. The minority, of which Sumption was one, held it couldn’t – or needn’t – be done. For the majority, Lord Carnwath applied the principle that an unlawful decision was no decision and so was unprotected by the exclusionary clause. But neither of these is what the case was really about. The ...”

“... powerful man in the country and do their best to pretend he has some claim to be taken seriously (David Cameron reached the same plateau when his inability to remember how many houses he owned was allowed to fade into oblivion). With the result in the bag, the party handlers could safely let Kenny out of his pen for the final three-way debate. All in ...”

“... wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write ...”

“... frontiers in the making of nations. If Henry of Northumbria had not predeceased his father, King David I of Scotland, in 1152, Britain might have been divided at the Humber into two more equally sized political units, the kingdom of Greater Scotland (incorporating northern England) and the kingdom of Little England (made up of the midlands and south). Not ...”

“... resentment. Greek anti-semitism erupted in pogroms in Smyrna and Salonica. (Ottoman Jews, whom David Ben-Gurion despaired of converting to Zionism, were thus natural allies of the Turks.) In Alexandria under the Ottomans and from 1882 under the British, Europeans considered it acceptable to give Arabs a good hiding from time to time. The blending of ...”

“... could expect such (unpaid) hyperbole? Unlike Doubleday, Random House was old-fashioned and still held to the ideals of the ‘mighty generation’. Epstein found the firm congenial and it was his home for most of his publishing career, although he also found other outlets for his exuberant energies. In December 1962, a long strike began at the New York ...”

“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

“... were mere material for mockery. Amis quotes in his autobiography a truly hilarious parody of Lord David Cecil’s lecturing manner, admitting that he borrowed it from John Wain. I remember Wain ‘doing’ J.B. Leishman and F.W. Bateson, both of whom he respected, in a similar way. Such were the amusements of the Movement before its members became ...”

“... Change’. These pieces, together with McFarlane’s insightful work from the 1940s, David Morgan’s from the 1990s and a later Catto piece on ‘The Burden and Conscience of Government in the 15th Century’, are his lodestars. The Henry he gives us is largely familiar: deeply religious, just in temperament, firm and busily active in points of ...”

“... out of Ixtepec, a Oaxacan town on the overland migrant route. It looked like a location from a David Lynch movie. The entrance was festooned with orange and black ribbons, pumpkins, plastic gnomes, scarecrows and witch effigies. By the door, a raccoon scrabbled desperately on a metre-long chain. In the reception area a wooden rocking chair and a pair of ...”

“... underway at the time, and Lois and Charles were arrested. Over the next few days, they were held in various places, including the central police station and an inconspicuous house which the Communists had taken over as a secret jail. The Orrs’ strange friend Tioli had already tried to alert them that they were in danger. On 16 June, it seems, Charles ...”

“... of the victims is still assumed. The Oedipus myth is one example. There is a plague: Oedipus is held to be responsible on account of the difference-dissolving crimes of incest and parricide, and is banished so that order can be restored. Rather than pure fiction, or the realisation of guilty infantile desires, the story of Oedipus is, Girard claims, another ...”

“... either as economic success sabotaged by the oil crisis and the consequences of over-tempting loans held out by disingenuous Western bankers, or as hectic boom, unwisely stoked up, and followed by inevitable crash; either as a Westpolitik, shrewdly negotiated with the West Germans, or as mere submission to Moscow’s interests in Brandt’s ...”