“... them believe this. Profumo’s other role was to prepare the British army for the end of National Service. Conscription had been in place since 1939, and after the war it had been formalised as a continuing peacetime commitment. The Conservative government wanted to create a professional army, better suited to the specialist demands of the postwar ...”

“... Offa as ‘overlord of the M5’ in Mercian Hymns as referring to a branch of the British secret service rather than the motorway system. Such contingent stuff enters his poetry with a mordant mischief, as though advertising its transience, a spirit that has always been there in Hill though not always appreciated: Hill himself spoke of ‘the constant ...”

“... is the same sharp edge in Spender’s thoughtful description of his late friend, in the memorial service address, as ‘the incarnation of a serious joke’. Being​ properly serious for the 1930s poets meant being engaged in a left-wing way, but there was always something elusive about Auden’s politics. Spender’s contribution to the New Verse number ...”

“... of sad middle-aged men are encouraged to blame their failure in life on these ancient wanks, a service for which the state will now reward them far more munificently than King ever did. 16 February: Man on the phone opposite takes a piss by the wall, talking throughout. I wonder whether he tells the person he is talking to that he’s currently having a ...”

“... he to you’: Sneyd should send Gillray to Canning’s door, which he would answer, to perform the service and to get his face looked at. A bribe of a conventional sort, maybe, but it could also have been a political trap. As Clayton puts it, ‘the coincidence of Canning’s invitation conveyed by Sneyd to Gillray on 21 January 1796 with Gillray’s arrest on ...”

“... According to this line of reasoning – proclaimed in Hungary by Viktor Orbán, in Slovakia by Robert Fico, in Germany by the nationalist leftist Sahra Wagenknecht and the pro-Russian AfD, and in the US by sub-Trumps like Vivek Ramaswamy – Putin’s invasion was merely regrettable (though Trump himself called the first stage of the attack ...”

“... We did debate at some length the relationship between the police and the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales, and I am aware that some of our critics would have liked us to recommend that the CPS should directly oversee the way in which the police conduct their investigation and prepare their case. But we concluded that to achieve a ...”

“... with good grace but it’s hard when it was brought about by a campaign eloquently described by Robert Harris as ‘the most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event of my lifetime’: words which, incidentally, were written before the announcement of the murder of Jo Cox, the defacement of London’s Polish Social and Cultural Association, and the ...”

“... as strong and beautiful as Anthony could lose his life just like that. The army’s after-care service is rubbish. At the time, they say they’re going to give you the world but they don’t.’ The last thing Anthony Wakefield saw in life was dimly lit waste ground, a road going out of town at the edge of Amara. But the sight could not have been ...”

“... 4 documentary called Geordies Overboard, about his calamitous efforts to run a volunteer lifeboat service – at one point he tells the documentary makers that ‘I’m very rarely wrong. Very rarely. The only thing I’m not certain about is when I’m going to die.’ He’s also Trump-like in his readiness to show that what had been considered binding ...”

“... school?Oh, entirely. How old were you when you went to Oxford?Well, you had to do your National Service in those days. They tended to accept you for university two years hence, as it were. It would have been for 1958 I was accepted although I took the exam in 1955.What branch did you serve in?The Air Force. The Information ...”

“... was that the writer was an elderly man whose name carried with it an uncertain stigma. In 1983 Robert Fisk published In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-45 and this seemed to settle the argument about what Stuart had been doing in Germany. Fisk’s account of the episode was based on transcripts of Stuart’s broadcasts in the ...”

“... travelled. Look it up.’ Norman looked it up in the Dictionary of Quotations to find that it was Robert Frost. ‘I know the word for you,’ said the Queen. ‘Maam?’ ‘You run errands, you change my library books, you look up awkward words in the dictionary and find me quotations. Do you know what you are?’ ‘I used to be a ...”

“... It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership ...”

“... called Brutalism? ABK were thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland ...”