“... when I was at school and doing the (somehow obligatory) amateur dramatics I was in William Douglas Home’s The Chiltern Hundreds with one of my lines ‘That’s the cross I’ve got to bear.’ A devout Christian at the time I felt I couldn’t say this line, my notion of piety having much more to do with dubious issues of conscience like this than with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... period and the identity of characters in the new section – it was 1926, it turned out, and ‘Lord Valance’ was not the Lord Valance of the last section. Even a man’s apparently demented cries of ‘Rubbish! Rubbish!’ were misleading, since he was merely shouting at a dog of that name. These alienation effects ...”

“... peak when they go riding in Rotten Row and, in the presence of royalty, Gladys spots a friend from home and unleashes an ear-splitting ‘Cooee!’ Despite her mother-in-law’s best efforts to house-train her, Gladdie seems to be incorrigible, and she begins to pine away under the icy blast of their dislike. Eventually she runs off in despair and fakes ...”

“... him of exploitation of her, use of her ideas (as if those ideas were actually owned by her – the Lord is a jealous Lord), and even of theft of notebooks left behind in 1936 in their joint Mallorcan home. The notebooks were in fact destroyed unread by Graves within a few weeks of his ...”

“... of it was spent as an MP. Parliamentary and ministerial precocity went together. Jenkins was Home Secretary at 45, the youngest since Winston Churchill, and Chancellor of the Exchequer at 47. In both these posts he gave much-needed sparkle to a drab and sometimes grubby government; in the second, he also managed to undo much, though not all, of the ...”

“... talk constructively to the United Nations or to Alfonsin. What is peculiar about the decline at home is not that it happened at all, or even that it happened for the reasons it did, but that everyone was so transfixed by it. Hence the delay, and then on the left me farce, on the right the force, of the eventual reaction. The story is indeed awful, but ...”

“... The question what Keynes would be advocating today is, of course, a nonsense question.’ So Lord Kahn warned us in a brilliant lecture in 1974, invoking Keynes’s propensity – ‘apart from the fact that he would be 91 years old’ – to develop new answers for new questions, rather than to make a fetish of consistency ...”

“... morning again. As always, they find no inspiration in Clement Attlee. He is very much Labour’s Lord Salisbury – long-lasting and successful, but an end rather than a beginning. Instead it is Nye Bevan whose words our authors like to quote. As a whole, Renewal scarcely does justice to the range of ideas recently emerging from the Opposition. The omissions ...”

“... For whom the stars move and their breath is fire – it hardly tries to give us Dionysus, the lord of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the ...”

“... alive. ‘When I was dead, my spirit turned/To seek the much-frequented house,’ begins ‘At Home’, whose speaker discovers that her former friends are still enjoying themselves and expecting tomorrow to be better, because they have a tomorrow to look forward to:I shivered comfortless, but cast                    No chill across the ...”

“... and are proud to be just about decipherable in the blurred background of a majesty-mayoral-chain-lord-lieutenant-town-crier framed photo on a mantlepiece of honour in a spit and polish house just like all the houses of the house-proud little people they’ve ever seen. They know the scent of fresh paint, of just-crimped lawns, beeswax, Cardinal Red ...”

“... in September 2013 showed no improvement, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for schools, Lord Nash, wrote to tell the school its funding arrangement would cease and that it must close. The Discovery New School was the first closure, but not the most notorious. The Al-Madinah School in Derby was forced to close its secondary school when ...”

“... walking tour, leaving his clothes on the banks of the Danube to suggest that he’d drowned. (Lord Cockburn, a family friend, feared the influence of Young Werther and ‘a sudden Germanising of the noddle’.) He reappeared in Edinburgh two years later, still not cured despite the excruciating interventions of a Hungarian surgeon; eventually a French ...”

“... when the Muggletonian Reading Room in Bishopsgate was blitzed. These boxes have now found a home in the British Library as Additional MSS 60168-60256, thanks to the good offices of Noakes’s widow, Thompson, William Lamont and others. What to do with this equivalent, for the archaeology of sectarian nonconformity, of Howard Carter’s discovery of the ...”