“... to young writers. Thom, who was often compared to Auden on account of being queer, famous and an English expatriate poet living in America, met Auden at least once. They didn’t particularly get along. Thom wasn’t at all catty about other poets (well, rarely), but at this late stage in his career Auden in public had become Auden. Thom remembered him going ...”

“... full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a worthwhile place to be is immensely heartening. The British Council can still be thought a bit of a joke but like the World Service it’s a more useful investment of public money than any ...”

“... Arnold Kettle. The Kettles were well-known left-wingers, Arnold Kettle a Communist and lecturer in English at the university. They lived not far from us in Headingley and were eventually, though not I think at this time, customers at our butcher’s shop. Like Professor Needham, Mrs Kettle denounced the invasion of North Korea by the Americans and their use of ...”

“... designed for use, and many of its books were secular. They attracted readers and disruption. Richard de Bury, an English bibliophile who knew the Sorbonne collection well, warned librarians to keep students away from their books, since they ate cheese while they read and dribbled fragments onto the page. Yet despite ...”

“... why bother with him? Well, he is undoubtedly a fascinating figure in his own right; one of those English (or in his case Anglo-Irish-Scottish) upperish-class oddballs who enliven Our Island Story. For a start he looked odd: quite short (O’Toole wasn’t at all right for the part in that respect), with a disproportionately large head, which earned him the ...”

“... Copland. The following year her choreography for Oklahoma! revolutionised Broadway. The composer Richard Rodgers had just left his lyricist Lorenz Hart for Oscar Hammerstein II, and the new team realised that the usual dance razzmatazz wasn’t going to be right for a show about cowboys and farmers at the turn of the century. Before Rodeo, de Mille, who was ...”

“... it is words that are the spring of action. (‘This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head,’ Richard II says, ‘Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders.’) The Crown has few pretences, and it isn’t Shakespeare, but it sets up a properly sophisticated relationship between words and actions, a relationship in which saying and not saying is ...”

“... the rationalisations. This script could certainly have made a good film: it was intended for Richard Lester in 1982, but ‘the finances were never found.’ The other three film scripts have become real movies. One of them, The Comfort of Strangers, is another macabre: it adapts Ian McEwan’s novel about an Italian sadist and his subservient wife ...”

“... could be restored to integrity,’ says Harrison. Quite so, but Hitler and his green lieutenant Richard Walther Darre throve on that too. (Anna Bramwell’s work in this area is a conspicuous omission from the otherwise excellent bibliography, the length of which makes one pause to reflect on the number of trees which have been cut down in the cause of ...”

“... effective he was. The jury was taken aback when Mr Heseltine’s Civil Service Private Secretary, Richard Mottram, casually revealed, to the incredulity of Ponting’s counsel and the jury, that the Commander-in Chief’s Official Report on the Falklands War had been tampered with behind his back, in relation to the crucial timing of the contact between HMS ...”

“... has to dissemble to gain office then it will dissemble. It was not unreasonable to think that the English electorate disliked the Conservatives but distrusted Labour. If, therefore, labour had to pretend to utter respectability to win the electorate’s support then it must be utterly respectable, What it did in office is another matter. As it happens, I ...”

“... fiction – from the very beginning when the poor little rich boy is abandoned to an unsympathetic English nanny by his remote father and uncaring worldly mother. The most vivid character and best lay in the story is not the writer Louise de Vilmorin who questioned the Baron about circumcision while running her fingers through his pubic hair, but Charley ...”

“... the creations of that time as the culmination of ‘a Whig-like interpretation of history’. Yet Richard Titmuss, both champion and critic of the new order, always placed the words ‘Welfare State’ in quotation-marks in case anyone should suppose that what had been achieved was the end of the story. It was Titmuss and his pupils who made the first ...”

“... connection comes later: for the French, ‘maison hantée’ is a 19th-century Anglicism. In English, the ghostly connection is at least as old as Shakespeare. Richard II tells us that some kings are ‘haunted by the ghosts they have deposed.’ Ghosts then were regular revenants, resident nuisances. In James, they ...”

“... Maurice Cowling was the English intelligentsia’s self-appointed pantomime ogre. Hamming up his villainy, he deliberately courted boos and hisses. In 1990, on the publication of the second edition of his book Mill and Liberalism (1963), he remembered with delight that one of its original reviewers had ‘obligingly’ described it as ‘“dangerous and unpleasant”, which was what it was intended to be ...”