“... himself, at one point denouncing American policy as ‘based on lies and distortions’. James Baker, George Bush’s secretary of state, barred him from entering the State Department. ‘I was offended by his glibness and his criticism of US policy – not to mention his arrogance and outlandish ambition,’ Robert Gates, then deputy national ...”

“... of Blair and Co; one of the many distasteful aspects of the whole affair is that anyone (Lord Hutton included) engaging with the issues has to do so in the language dictated by Number 10.15 September. At Thora Hird’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey the best joke is Thora’s own. When she was beginning to fail but was still living on her own ...”

“... his discovery that there were only 1,440 Jews in all of Palestine is not mentioned. The Reverend James Parkes is cited many times, but his evidence that the Jewish population of Jerusalem was less than a thousand in 1827, or that it formed only a third of its inhabitants by mid-century, is left out.For all her ‘bald facts’, Peters only manages to prove ...”

“... for the Boat Race. Go via Midhurst to look at the Camoys tombs in St George’s Church, Trotton. Lord Camoys was a veteran of Agincourt where he commanded the left wing; he married Hotspur’s widow and both of them are buried in a massive and inconveniently placed tomb at the east end of the centre aisle, smack in front of the altar. There’s another much ...”

“... initiated in 1954 under David Maxwell Fyfe as home secretary, whose most notable victim was Lord Montagu, imprisoned for 12 months for homosexual offences. On the Tube, Forster closely observes an ‘enormous young foreigner’. Was he perhaps ‘a Cossack dancer? I would have asked him, but dared not in these tiresome times.’ This exacerbated ...”

“... a B-29 gunner shouldn’t get more of the feel of what happened to him into what he writes.’ James Dickey, who also served in the war, wrote: ‘Did Jarrell never love any person in the service with him? Did he just pity himself and all the Others in a kind of monstrous, abstract, complacent and inhuman Compassion?’ He criticised the tameness of ...”

“... said. North Carolina was the birthplace of Billy Graham and three US presidents, Andrew Johnson, James Polk and Andrew Jackson, and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got nearer the Waffle House, someone on the radio made the ...”

“... like a year. I went to make some money and spent all of it while I was there.Was that when you met James Dickey?He played bluegrass music and he had this lake on his property and was forever showing off his muscles and thighs. At one point he said: ‘Yes, I’m so big, I’m so goddamn big! And no cocksucking English critic’s gonna tell me any ...”

“... brother and his wife felt that they had only just managed to keep him from too much drink, but to James himself Kenner’s belief that Stephen cannot become a novelist because he has taken to drink would seem merely typical of Bloom. However, it is consistent that when Bloom sees Stephen being led away from the library by Malachi he fears they are going to ...”

“... Piazzola, Ethel Merman’s Disco Album, Magnetic Fields, Flagstad and Svanholm in Die Walküre, Lord Kitchener and the Calypso All-Stars, Sonic Youth, Youssou N’Dour, tons of the Arditti Quartet, Kurt Cobain, Suzy Solidor, John McCormack, Cretan rembétika music, Jan and Dean, Los Pinguinos del Norte, Shostakovich film scores, Some Girls, Wunderlich doing ...”

“... someone who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked in the Lords debate on the higher education legislation last year, ‘If challenging the allegedly oppressive liberal cultural elite means insisting on climate change sceptics being appointed to senior academic positions ...”

“... of World War Two’. * I heard the president say: ‘Today, on bended knee, I thank the Good Lord for protecting those of our troops overseas, and our Coalition troops and innocent Iraqis who suffer at the hands of some of these senseless killings by people who are trying to shake our will.’ I heard that this was the first American president in wartime ...”

“... mankind. One evening, while I was an undergraduate at Oxford, about the time I first got to know Lord D.C., and he had given me the sense, which I had barely had up till that moment, of how easy it might be to talk to someone, the conversation after dinner turned to the differences between melancholy, and sadness, and nostalgia, and to what Turgenev, and ...”

“... simply staying put and waiting for things to happen? Last week I went to see the film version of Lord of the Rings – not having thought about Tolkien since I was 12. The trilogy’s a death-trip of course – a long weary trudge through mud, mines, ravaged woods and orc-infested caves. As I pondered the dire, cacophonous, corpse-laden wastelands through ...”

“... in Walmer Road while Tilbury and PC Dave Pullan went to another temporary relief centre, Clement James in Treadgold Street. ‘Because we were in uniform,’ Rumble said, ‘we were seen as authority figures, but people wouldn’t have perceived us as having anything to do with the council. But we are council. I was inside the cordon and my team were there ...”