“... loved to be photographed, he was not in the least concerned with his own image. Françoise Gilot said she couldn’t go on living with a monument, but that may have been sour grapes. No doubt he was passionately concerned with himself, but he was even more concerned with the things he made. And not with those he had made, but with whatever he happened to be ...”

“... correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward VII. Perhaps some of it was, but evidently much remains. I expressed the hope in the preface to my own book that one day ‘some wealthy foundation will finance a complete edition of the correspondence of the best letter-writer among all English ...”

“... Brideshead Revisited. It watches him struggle with madness and depression and boredom. He could be said to have died of boredom, but, like the woman in Belloc’s poem, ‘not before/Becoming an appalling bore’ himself. His war had begun, like Guy Crouchback’s in the ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy, as a crusade against the forces of atheism and ...”

“... rage at the mistake was a motivating factor in his alleged offence. Three police officers were said to have received minor injuries; presumably he hadn’t stopped to ask them for directions. Greg Milner includes a few stories about satnav fails in Pinpoint, his lively history of satellite navigation technology – his central chapter is called ‘Death by ...”

“... Australia) to the eastern Pacific, and perhaps beyond. In 1588 Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado sailed, or said he had sailed, from Davis Strait, north of Hudson Bay, into the fabled Strait of Anian that opened into the Pacific Ocean. These reports were later supported by Willem Schouten and Abel Tasman in the South Seas, and Juan de Fuca and Bartolomeo de Fonte in ...”

“... beautiful comparison to Siamese cats could be the beginning of a poem, as the reference to Edward Hicks’s famous primitive painting suggests, but it didn’t happen. He says – it’s 1955 – that his ‘head is full of ideas for poems, these days, but they vanish as soon as I sit down’. He often asks Monica’s views on his poems and her ...”

“... moral certitude but his ‘poised ambiguities’. In the new edition, The Devil Is an Ass is said to be marked by ‘moral ambiguity’, while the editor of Bartholomew Fair identifies ‘indeterminable ambivalences’ in a play which ‘encourages openness to uncertainty and multiple possibilities’. Those cases are powerfully and sympathetically ...”

“... if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s David Letterman?’ he asked us. ‘I don’t know this person. Why do these people bother me? He must be some New York person.’ A New York person was not a good thing to be. Bruno found they tended to be noisy and ...”

“... after Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was exiled to Rangoon after the Great Rebellion could there be said to be a vacancy on the imperial throne. Taylor records the occasional efforts of Indian potentates to appeal directly to the British sovereign. He mentions, for instance, the gifts sent to William IV and Queen Adelaide by the new king of Oudh in 1834. But he ...”

“... to dinner at Sandringham, where he joined the Queen Mother in a rousing chorus of ‘My old man said follow the van’. By then Coward had developed into the figure known to his staff – at his insistence – as the Master. Interviewing him for the Sunday Times in 1969, Hunter Davies wondered if he had really met Coward or just a facsimile. ‘Is there ...”

“... cut in, the dwawl part amused, part irritated. ‘You do live in a wonderful fantasy world,’ he said. For many, most of all for many in Benn’s own Party, that is seen to be the truth of it. The caricature has shifted in the past few years: he is no longer seen as mad and dangerous, just as mad. Soon, he will have to fight hard against being ...”

“... us, and Scott explains them very well indeed, makes them very moving. In fact, it could almost be said that his characters are all the more convincing because we don’t know them: a paradox that carries its own penalties and rewards.Scott was probably quite unconscious of the fact that he had developed a technique of novel-writing which could only realise ...”

“... had succeeded in making her look again at Corbyn: ‘If this is happening 500,000 times,’ she said, spreading her hands to indicate the ramifications. None of them went so far as to say that Corbyn could win the election, but they thought it possible that Labour could emerge as the largest party in Parliament, which would require the Tories to suffer a ...”

“... quo, whose resistance to change he despised. ‘We are an intensely conservative society,’ he said on the BBC in 1956, and ‘a class society, with marked social inequality … the obsession with the past, our heritage, not only softens some of the blows of the present but prevents us from tackling some of the present problems of our age … our grammar ...”

“... New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the disintegrations and realities of the 20th century. But ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ poetry refers more simply to changes in fashion, the growing up of new groups of designers and a new generation of consumers ...”