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“... to think there might be more effective, if well-tried, means of trying to regard the world afresh. Jack Flea’s Birthday Celebration was written in 1974, shortly after I had finished writing the last of the stories that were to make up my first collection, First Love, Last Rites, and I think of this play as really belonging in that volume. It was commissioned ...”

“... the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into port ...”

“... in an appropriate style. She climbed laboriously up to a small ‘chamber’ – it was the Jack London room – in one of the mansion’s towers where, among a plethora of nautical bric-à-brac, she found, on the bedside table, her crustacean muse. Rodney, of course, was long dead inside the mollusc shell that served as his hermitage, but encased in ...”

“... in any case part of his attraction. I should add that I do not agree with Vendler’s rejection of Andrew Motion’s historicist view of Keats’s poems, in her review of his biography of Keats (LRB, 16 October 1997), and believe that ‘To Autumn’ is on one level a great political poem which elegises those who were massacred at Peterloo. Among the many ...”

“... foray out of town – critics have tended to make it only as far as George Herbert’s Bemerton or Andrew Marvell’s Hull in any case – this study largely avoids the English capital, or at least as far as is compatible with still discussing Cymbeline and some minor bits of Milton. For the most part it shifts its formidably knowledgable attention to other ...”

“... films we have experienced. And it’s not where we were when we heard about the assassination of Jack Kennedy, but what we were watching: television. Home alone, or straining the neck to look at a wall-mounted set in a half-empty restaurant, we were in thrall to waveringly remote prints of reality. Meanwhile, on the same afternoon, the nominated ...”

“... its high, wood-panelled halls, judges’ thrones and trapdoors leading to basement cells where a Jack the Ripper suspect, William Piggott, was once held. Gravesend had a history of witch-finding, I was told. ‘If you were an elderly eccentric woman with bad skin, you had particular problems.’ Anne Neale, known as an ‘ill-tongued’ woman, sent for trial ...”

“... Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by Tristram) as one of the books he was putting in the guest bedrooms at Chatsworth. ‘I wish he’d leave a copy in all the bedrooms,’ drawls ...”

“... would rubberise itself into the shape of the spirit, who was, at various times, Lord Kitchener, Jack London or Franz Liszt (he came to tell the children to practise their instruments more frequently). But the barmy, scrambled upbringing wasn’t always innocent or even well-intentioned. Although Barnes later said that she loved her grandmother Zadel ‘as a ...”

“... trainers had the words ‘Royal Mail’ stamped on them in red, surrounded by a miniature Union Jack. He had no money, cards or means of identification on him whatsoever. His pockets contained only one thing: a tiny book of Biblical quotes, two inches by one, entitled Golden Words.Without a name, the dead man is referred to by Wapping River Police as ...”

“... manicurist.’ Brown compares his behaviour in the later stages of their marriage to that of Jack Manningham, the villain in Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight, who sets out by a series of fiendish tricks to convince his wife that she is mad. Snowdon did actually persuade the princess to visit a psychiatrist.She was in fact perfectly capable of looking ...”

“... letter to Harley that I quoted earlier, for instance, turns up slightly rephrased in Colonel Jack. The work that Richetti thinks Defoe’s best, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, is ‘full of his crotchets, pet ideas, and preoccupations’, animated by personal observation and anecdote. (It is also characteristic in containing ...”

“... there was an increasing homogeneity of casting (the ‘anything with Tara Fitzgerald’ syndrome). Andrew Davies withdrew his adaptation of Angela Lambert’s A Rather English Marriage from the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the ...”

“... while Second Street itself saw better days some time ago. The Borden house – see ‘Andrew J. Borden’ in flowing script on the brass plate next to the door – stands by itself with a few scant feet of yard on either side. On the left is a stable, out of use since he sold the horse. In the back lot grow a few pear trees, laden at this ...”

“... create a climate of excitement which finds Johnny Depp paying $ 15,000 for what purports to be Jack Kerouac’s old raincoat. The vendor cursed himself for letting the relic go so cheap: a soiled handkerchief was subsequently found in the pocket which could have been sold separately, or used to bump up the price tag by another couple of grand. We are all ...”