“... foam-rubber gloves were off in the fight for Britain’s comedy soul. Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith took aim at the old guard with a withering attack on The Two Ronnies as ‘The Two Ninnies’. Adrian Edmondson on The Young Ones ranted about The Good Life, Felicity Kendal and twee British sitcoms. Ben Elton peppered his routines with diatribes about ...”

“... stable and suitable for life.As an illustration, in 1983 Lovelock and the atmospheric scientist Andrew Watson devised Daisyworld, a computer simulation of a hypothetical world in which ecological competition between daisies of different colours affects planetary albedo, or the amount of solar radiation that is reflected back out into space – one of the ...”

“... Hae’ or ‘A Red, Red Rose’. While Paterson’s non-bard is wee enough to fit in a matchbox, Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg offer a bard of Victorian amplitude. The Canongate Burns runs to over a thousand pages, many of them by Noble and Hogg. A lot less stylish, their introduction alone is almost as long as Paterson’s whole book. They feel ...”

“... I can. It’s not my sort of book at all, but it leaves me wanting to read his other books. Zadie Smith thinks it a masterpiece and says so on the cover. Certainly it’s a new way of writing a novel.25 May, Yorkshire. To Leeds this morning in an empty train with neither of us feeling very clever but revived by a lovely lunch at Sous le Nez in Leeds, mine ...”

“... it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had owned: it ...”

“... there was ‘no clear demarcation between “revolutionary” and “reformist”’, as Joan Smith points out in The ILP on Clydeside, 1893-1932, and, in Glasgow at least, the ILP and BSP ‘shared similar policies and held joint demonstrations’ and were involved in both political and industrial activism (nationally, the SDF/BSP was much less ...”

“... Links remain, however. The junior officers of 1990 run the army of 2022. General Mark Carleton-Smith, the current chief of the general staff, passed out of Sandhurst in 1986. Sales’s assessment is revealing of a culture that requires rigidity in order to function amid the terror, fatigue and confusion of war, but as a consequence often ignores criticism ...”

“... well and was more than reciprocally rewarded three times, in You Can’t Take It with You, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Ford called on him for a pair of late films. In Two Rode Together, Stewart and his co-star, Richard Widmark, are lost to their better qualities, lazy, loud-voiced, working from an undernourished script, with ...”

“... would be reached in much the same time as the present two and a quarter hours). At the time, Andrew Adonis was the number two transport minister. A long-time devotee of the railways, having joined the Cotswold Line Promotion Group as a teenager in the 1980s, he began pushing for Labour to support a new north-south line. Geoff Hoon, the transport ...”

“... voters baulked and the Tories won comfortably with a lead of over 7 per cent. But the minute Smith succeeded Kinnock, Labour shot into a lead which was consolidated beyond recovery by the effect of the forced exit from the ERM in September 1992. The Government had endlessly told the electorate that leaving the ERM would be a disaster and had even raised ...”

“... just such a reaction chain. When the host, the comedian Chris Rock, made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, her husband, Will Smith, strode up on stage and slapped Rock in the face on live television. For several days afterwards, countless commentators, celebrities and social media users sought to distinguish ...”

“... turn someone smiling, loving almost.23 March. Asked by the Guardian if I would like to interview Andrew McMillan, the poet. Though I’m an admirer I say no, only because if I did it would be as much about myself as about McMillan and how his life has been very different from mine.24 March. Rupert asks me about Worship Street, where I lodged in the early ...”

“... exclude technology, Patriotism Appeal and the royal sod. They have on the whole excluded Kipling. Andrew Rutherford’s 1971 Penguin selection tried to smuggle him in by putting the emphasis on the later, more psychologically and artistically complex stories. But as Angus Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed out in his 1977 biography, this ...”

“... and less astringent productions like A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), plus memories of Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie, gave rise to a late-life idea of her as a treasurably naughty grande dame, all genteel camp and classily to-the-point prose. Others, however, saw her as a glamorous point of contact with developments on the Continent. She showed an interest ...”

“... to repudiate the past and make a new start.’ Of course, that doesn’t always come as good news. Andrew Sanders’s brisk and engaging dash through the reactions of Dickens, Carlyle, Thackeray, Macaulay, and heaven help us, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, shows just how rapidly British middle-of-the-road opinion could slide into Podsnappian condemnation of ...”