“... Cork. Townsend went on to found Art Monthly in 1976 with Jack and Nell Wendler. Under Townsend, James Faure-Walker had been a contributor to Studio International. Cork made his copy less welcome and Faure-Walker and others set up Artscribe. Eventually Peter and I began to meet at Bertorelli’s for wine, talk, food and more wine. At my suggestion, John Tagg ...”

“... of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July ...”

“... charge of attempting to obtain money under false pretences. The author of that hoax, reputed to be Lord Birkenhead, turned out to be an actor named Hesketh Pearson. In a subsequent book of breezy reflections on the craft of biography called Ventilations, Pearson gave examples of how the non-fiction writer may use his fancy to improve on fact – a perversion ...”

“... and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his postgraduate knowingness about Barthes and other purveyors of the higher froggy nonsense, Francis is revealed to be a ...”

“... tropics, the search for a different earthly orientation or accommodation)? Maybe Browning or Henry James – the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens?Most readers of the poems will have a pretty accurate sense of the life, though not one derived from the ...”

“... who was fussy about what he would or would not eat could scarcely do a prince’s business. As James I instructed his son, ‘your dyet should bee accommodatte to your affaires, & not your affaires to your diet.’ The job of the dietary writer was, therefore, to work within these conventions, fine-tuning them to ensure that courtiers, and those who ...”

“... the worst during the war and were themselves responsible for the appointment of a committee under Lord Fleming to consider their relationship to society and to wartime democracy. The committee’s report was feeble, though some children benefited from the scholarships set up by a few education authorities under its aegis. Doing away with the public ...”

“... assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s ...”

“... old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere.1 June. Coming to the end of English Pastoral, James Rebanks’s second volume. It’s harder to read than A Shepherd’s Life, with the central section about the onset of factory farming not easy to take. Thankfully, though, in his own life at any rate the tide turns and Rebanks regains his grip on ...”

“... Keats, he fused genres and wrote verse epistles. There are feisty examples addressed to the poets James Simmons (with whom relations became strained) and Michael Foley. His best-known exercise in this mode is ‘An Open Letter’, which was published as a Field Day pamphlet in 1983. Mildly protesting about the appearance of the word ‘British’ in the title ...”

“... refurbished the prime minister’s Downing Street flat with £112,000 provided by Tory donors, but Lord Geidt, Allen’s successor, found that Johnson had been unaware of where the money had come from. Geidt himself resigned after his decision was subjected to criticism (he wasn’t replaced). Johnson was, however, reprimanded for failing to declare which kind ...”

“... of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977), James Atlas describes the eleven-part code of conduct Schwartz drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations of ...”

“... for weeks, walking round the garden listening to the tape and saying the words out loud. 3 May. Lord Browne disgraced largely thanks to the Mail on Sunday and the bribery of a Canadian youth. The newspapers painstakingly explain why we should feel no sympathy for him, but if the Mail chose to target Heinrich Himmler I would tend to be on his side. The young ...”

“... Agreement of April 1987, signed at a secret meeting between Peres and Hussein at the home of Lord Mishcon in London. The agreement envisaged an international conference with a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and negotiations on the basis of Resolutions 242 and 338. Peres read the agreement to Shamir but refused to give him a copy although by now ...”

“... factor, Thomas Wooldridge, who ‘cooked up the occasion’ for Wheatley’s address to Lord Dartmouth. The poem was a turning point in Wheatley’s efforts to gather her poetry in a book. After the first proposal of 1772 came to nothing, the Wheatleys took a different approach. The family collected testimonies, shared poems in manuscript and ...”