“... 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 ...”

“... getting things wrong, but he has plenty of brio when getting things right as well. ‘I did meet Lord Alfred Douglas on two occasions,’ he writes in 1994: He came to see me in my dressing-room after a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest during the early years of the war, but I was very disappointed, finding him quite without charm – and when I ...”

“... feminism’ has given women the idea that it is ‘socially affirming’ to ‘work outside the home’, and that schools in Massachusetts have banned children’s books featuring heterosexual parents. His wife home-schools their seven children, and he believes that education is the responsibility of parents, not ...”

“... for the last hymn, Hail Queen of Heaven, part of the gradual curves of her calves. He reminds Our Lord present on the altar that he has never tried to see beneath her skirt and asks Him to protect her always from boys or men who may want to do impure things to her. In answer to his prayer he is allowed to see how the man who goes ...”

“... great private houses of the aristocracy were increasingly hemmed in by shops, inns and theatres. Lord Cavendish, irritated by passers-by throwing oyster shells and other rubbish over his garden wall at Burlington House, blocked it off on the west side by building the Burlington Arcade – then, as now, the longest arcade in Britain. Despite all the ...”

“... an old lady, and since Norman’s introduction to the world of work had been via an old people’s home on Tyneside old ladies held no terrors for him. To Norman she was his employer, but her age made her as much patient as Queen and in both capacities to be humoured, though this was, it’s true, before he woke up to how sharp she was and how much wasted. She ...”

“... you conform. In such an environment gossip is an instrument with real teeth: your job and your home may depend upon it. Is gossip still a killer in the Western world? Liberalism has gone to a lot of trouble to draw its teeth, and to make sure that whatever you do you won’t have to suffer for it physically at society’s hands. In her novel The Groves of ...”

“... waited five weeks for a decision and I can’t wait any longer. I shall tell Lady Allenby to come home.’ Lloyd George took him by the arm and said, ‘You have waited five weeks, Lord Allenby, wait five minutes more.’ Fuming, Allenby waited – and got what he wanted. Allenby’s emancipatory decree, like others ...”

“... you,’ he said, adding, as he flung himself out of The Presence like a schoolboy taking his bat home: ‘I wouldn’t do it for anyone else.’ The fate of the Fur Labelling Order reminded me of Tony Benn’s dedicated efforts, while Postmaster General, to cut the Queen’s head off postage stamps. At the time it seemed to him an important gesture, not to ...”

“... bring back memories of a similar disaster at Bolton in 1946. We never took a Sunday paper at home but sometimes saw the News of the World when we went down to Grandma’s on a Sunday night, and I think I knew at 11 years old that there was something wrong about the gusto with which the tragic story was written up, and something prurient about the way I ...”

“... of violence, hypocrisy and will by which slave-driving settlers such as W.C. Wentworth, ‘the lord of the lash and triangle’, Benjamin ‘Flogger’ Boyd and John MacArthur – all of whom we meet with in the narrative – came to control the land, ‘filling it with blood and the suppuration of needless misery’. What keeps this spirit ...”

“... and discouraging group animosity would ‘probably break or weaken the bands of society at home, and close the busiest scenes of national occupations and virtues’. At one level, Ferguson was the Iron John of the Enlightenment. Warning against the complacent assumption that civility was to be found only in the epicene refinement of salon culture, he ...”

“... on the Stock Exchange, and was knighted in 1997 for services to health care. Martin Landau went home to Monte Carlo for a while, but returned to the British property market in the mid-Nineties with a new firm which included on its board the chairman of the Welsh Development Agency (who also lives in Monte Carlo) and a former treasurer of the Tory ...”