“... of superannuated Pinter. There is always a war with real life. Storey describes a rehearsal with John Gielgud (as Harry) and Ralph Richardson (as Jack) of Home, his play about England and everyday madness. The actors are navigating their way around two chairs and a table. Storey starts by showing the two actors before segueing into what’s happening ...”

“... dangers of the kind T.S. Eliot encountered and Auden described when he wrote that Eliot took ‘the only possible line. Except at a few unusual moments, he kept the style Drab.’ Raine, in his preface to The Electrification, showed that he was painfully aware of these difficulties: ‘Shelley’s The Cenci or Coleridge’s Osorio exists as ...”

“... been debated for decades whether Wilson resigned on this matter, along with Aneurin Bevan and John Freeman, because of the principle of National Health, or because of the more ancient principle of reculer pour mieux sauter. And it’s hard to blur this choice, but Ziegler has a clumsy try at the task. Prescription charges, on the one hand, Gaitskell’s ...”

“... the spirit of the new music in the same way that the voice of Mahalia Jackson identified Gospel. John Smith’s discography of Johnny Cash, who was resident in Memphis at the time and also benefited from Phillips’s expertise, contributes to the idea of a movement. Presley’s intelligence, however, has always been in doubt. Joe Esposito, his infamous ...”

“... Henry Adams reports in his autobiography that at a dinner at the American Embassy at which John Bright was the chief British guest, he thumped the table and announced: ‘the English are a nation of brutes and should be exterminated to the last man.’ This statement shocked Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell, the Minister, and the other Americans ...”

“... gramophone records of Rumanian church music on the table, next to a pile of prayers composed by John Donne (who also preached at St Dunstan’s). This sturdy English church is encircled with chapels for several of the independent Churches which are in communion with the Church of England, Coptic and Ethiopian, Polish (with a figure of the redoubtable Black ...”

“... rather than risking his own neck by posting them on to the Kremlin. And that was all. This Alice took one step through the looking-glass, turned in alarm to retreat, and found his way blocked by his own reflection scowling and mouthing the word ‘traitor’. So he lived with his ‘secret’, which really consisted only in his knowledge that Guy Burgess and ...”

“... acutely aware of their linguistic distinctiveness, signalled in the first edition of the Rev. John Jamieson’s influential Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published in 1808-09. Carlyle, the sage of Craigenputtock, had not stayed there, but in literary London he retained and exploited his outsider’s sense of his own alien speech and ...”

“... it with phosphorus and calcium, to the detriment of rare alpine plants.A delicate issue. The John Muir Trust and the other owners of the land around Ben Nevis have constructed a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ at the foot of the mountain, and are removing the memorials from the open hill. As for ashes, well, the Nevis Partnership says: try throwing ...”

“... outposts, white ones sent to London from missions abroad – are full of entertaining examples. John Russell’s 1967 dispatch from Brazil begins: ‘Like the surface of the moon Rio is short of water, covered in dust and pocked with deep holes.’ American diplomats wrote of hotels in Xilin which provided contraception as standard and noted ‘no mention ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... The elder brother quickly turned into a young dandy. One of the funniest photos Lartigue ever took was of Zissou in the boating pool at Rouzat in 1911. Zissou is sitting in a ‘rubber pocket’, a recent invention (not his) for duck hunters. It consists of a fat inner tube onto which are moulded a pair of rubber legs, dimly present below the surface of ...”

“... In​ ‘Dream Song 364’, quite close to the end of the sequence, John Berryman’s avatar/protagonist Henry is once more being remorselessly flattered. He has surely read everything there is to read. (One thinks of Mallarmé’s opening line from ‘Brise Marine’, ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres ...”

“... among journalist colleagues for taking his success too seriously.Woodward turned to the comedian John Belushi and another kind of fall: tragic early death. He wrote books about the CIA and the Pentagon, on Clinton and Alan Greenspan, carrying on at the Post as well, making a name for himself as a reporter and author others wished to emulate. He’d brought ...”

“... happily in the ornamental pond there, but the other, taking advantage of the not very long lawn, took off for home, presumably Regent’s Park. In the morning its companion did the same.26 January. Come back on an early train from Yorkshire to catch the last day of the National Art Collections Fund exhibition at Christie’s. Expecting St James’s to be ...”