“... in the middle of a field.20 January. Collected by the New Yorker and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde ...”

“... they got.’ On 1 May 2003, I heard that 140 American soldiers had died in combat in Iraq. I heard Richard Perle tell Americans to ‘relax and celebrate victory’. I heard him say: ‘The predictions of those who opposed this war can be discarded like spent cartridges.’ I heard Lieutenant-General Jay Garner say: ‘We ought to look in a mirror and get ...”

“... have got their hands quite so dirty. As E.P. Thompson grudgingly conceded in The Making of the English Working Class, ‘Notions as to the traditional stupidity of the British ruling class are dispelled by an acquaintance with the Home Office papers.’ In fact, Thompson mused, you could write a convincing history of ...”

“... his clothes: he is wearing ‘a white waistcoat embroidered with gold’ and ‘a shirt-frill of English lace, yellow with age, the magnificence of which a queen might have envied’. Then the face: ‘That dark face was full of angles and furrowed deep in every direction; the chin was furrowed; there were great hollows at the temples; the eyes were sunken ...”

“... speculation’. Its style and approach, it’s true, bring Kitty Kelley to mind more often than Richard Ellmann: it is aimed squarely at an audience conceived as wanting its close readings of ‘Pike’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’ leavened by details of Hughes’s ‘vigorous’ love-making, and likely to be impressed by pseudo-profound sentences such as ...”

“... Browne observes, and deplores abuse of the pope); and in his fidelity to the institutional English Church. It appears also, Debora Shuger has pointed out, in his doctrinal minimalism, whereby no denomination should insist that they are the only true Christians: ‘those who doe confine the Church of God, either to particular Nations, Churches, or ...”

“... cure was to give the Jews a land of their own. They would make Palestine as Jewish as England was English. Balfour supported Weizmann’s proposals to settle Europe’s ‘people apart’ in Palestine. In 1916 he became Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s coalition Government and in 1917 made the Zionist prescription British policy. The Declaration went to ...”

“... More generally, there is the literature on the corruption of the innocent which takes its cue from Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy and which is apt to picture every form of mass consumption as degenerate. Here – as in the writings of Jeremy Seabrook – it is the prosperity of the working class, rather than, or as well as, the poverty, which is the ...”

“... written for medical journals in a subsequent attempt to figure out her condition. In 1978, Richard Altick put together the pieces of her story in The Shows of London. Until very recently (as far as I could tell), Altick was the only person outside the medical profession who had written about her this century. Now Jan Bondeson, whose paper on her ...”

“... was to go to America to work with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. In a letter to Richard Buckle, Lincoln Kirstein described Nureyev ‘making peeeteeyous Russky noises’ about joining the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... who not infrequently joined professional bands in public performances at that time (the leading English amateur violinist and composer, John Marsh, complained in his journal that Haydn’s symphonies were also becoming too taxing for him). But for all their technical difficulty, Haydn and Mozart’s later symphonies were still written in the vernacular of ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... is clear evidence that Shakespeare read and remembered Ovid’s Latin and was not confined to English translations. He alludes to or borrows phrases from all 15 books of Ovid’s great mythological poem, the Metamorphoses. He also knew the Fasti (a poetic calendar of the Roman year), the Heroides (verse letters to absent lovers) and parts at least of the ...”

“... High Court action, in July, 1987, had everything. A loyal wife. A weeping prostitute. An un-English ‘sneak’ in the shape of a rich Pakistani lawyer. But most of all it had Mr Justice Caulfield, whose summing-up contained sentiments and phrases which quickly passed through the courtroom door and into folklore. He asked the jury to ponder the ...”