“... second significant event was the debate over ‘Rothschild’ – that is, the report in 1971 by Lord Rothschild, head of the government ‘Think Tank’, on the organisation and management of government R & D. His crude demand that research results should be supplied, on ‘contract’, for the ‘customers’ that were buying them, was a direct challenge ...”

“... was that you had to deal with foreigners. Abroad was scarcely less of a problem for them than for Lord Redesdale, immortalised by his Mitford daughters and famous for saying that ‘Abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’ The bloodiness of Abroad was something that Stalin and his cohort knew by repute rather than direct experience. Stalin ...”

“... of judgments based on appearance. Commentators are quick to read the signs, the measured droop of Lord Bragg’s handkerchief, the precise organisation of Tony Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and ...”

“... fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks, and 16 furze bushes’. A century later the design for Lord Hay’s Masque – almost certainly devised by the pre-eminent artist of the genre, Inigo Jones – followed in this tradition: its action opened on a magnificent prospect of woodland, with a Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of ...”

“... Thomas fitzThomas, at St Paul’s in 1265: ‘As long as you wish to be a good king and lord to us, we will be faithful and devoted to you.’After this unpromising start – a civil war in which the barons only narrowly opted in the end for the child Henry rather than Louis – the reign of Henry III was to be the longest of any English king before ...”

“... the girl’s hunger for warm affection is too intense for those social virtues: too much to make a home out of that cold, brittle, colourless, elegant, hollow house, shuttered and muffled against the noises of London, wherein Anna’s ‘cut-glass’ lamp drops its complex shadow on the white stone floor, where the hearth of Thomas’s study is warmed by the ...”

“... was a poet, playwright, pianist, composer and actress, and these activities took her away from home for long and irregular periods of time. When she rematerialised, we had long goodnights during which, as she sang to me, I undid her hair so that it fell over her shoulders. She used to parade naked in front of me, and would tell me (for instance) of the ...”

“... submitted a memo in which he set out at some length the dreadful scandal of the Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast. Wallace had submitted his first report on Kincora more than two years before and had even put out a press statement in early 1973 which stated that William McGrath, head of the sinister Orange private army, TARA, was using ‘a non-existent ...”

“... and public) with the virtuous country dame, ‘she never heard of half a mile from home’, he really wishes that women and the virtuous poor remain icons of virtue, unpublished and unpublic. But a great many women of the 18th century, including some like Mary Collier and Ann Yearsley who were poor, were heard of many miles from ...”

“... many papers before it, was investigating how Mandelson could afford to purchase a Notting Hill home, have it done up by a minimalist designer with a maximum rate-card, while buying a £70,000 house in Hartlepool, dressing in Savile Row suits and patronising the best restaurants. (The questions have still not been answered, incidentally. We now know ...”

“... Later in the year he published a pamphlet, ‘Cursory Strictures on the charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury’, which, though anonymous, certainly took risks by its outspoken line on the prosecution of Thelwall and his friends. He also wrote a powerful novel of social protest, Things As They Are, or Caleb Williams, in which the ...”

“... he left them under cover in the wooden summer-house – painted yellow – among the trees in the home meadow, unless a maid or the governess happened to be walking in the direction of the house. On the other hand, carrying parcels is something a governess would probably not have done, and I have no idea whether the summer-house is or was yellow. My favourite ...”

“... surface, initially, working in the coal-screening plant at Woolley Colliery, a few miles from his home: You couldn’t see more than two yards for dust and the noise was so intense you had to speak with your hands. I had to scrape the caked dust from my lips before I could eat my sandwiches ... I saw men with one arm and one leg, men crippled and emotionally ...”

“... at the BBC he made a half-cooked documentary about his estrangement from his family (‘even at home with my own parents I felt a shame-faced irritation with the tempo of a pickle-jar style of living’) which to his astonishment caused considerable resentment among his family and neighbours. His shame at the headline ‘Miner’s Son at Oxford Ashamed of ...”

“... time we quit while the going’s good.’ The doctor and nurse were blank. When we got home the Poet said he supposed they didn’t watch much US TV drama. It was only later that I thought that maybe, ever since Breaking Bad’s first broadcast, oncologists and their nurses all over the Western world have been subjected to the meth-cooking joke ...”