“... 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‘she never heard of half a mile from home’, he really wishes that women and the virtuous poor remain icons of virtue, unpublished and unpublic.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them from one far-flung posting to the next. Sometimes parents sought to leave their children at home while they travelled abroad. Joseph Galloway was reluctant to drag his daughter across the Atlantic with him. ‘It was at first my resolution to leave her. It was also her inclination to stay. But with whom could I leave her?’ he wondered. Patriot ...”

“... and one of Jeeves (‘London’s Finest Dry Cleaners’), but in 1501 this was Wynkyn de Worde’s home and printing house: he rented a former inn for £3 6s 8d a year from a priory in Buckinghamshire. De Worde would have looked out at the cistern house of the Fleet River; on a weekday morning now, the glass and chrome of Shoe Lane is full of suited ...”

“... part of the new DIY fad (it developed into a chapter in Theatres of Memory). Had I ever been to home improvement superstores like B&Q? (I had.) Did they sell new cornices and dado rails or fake wrought iron? (They did.) Could we meet to talk about it? We talked, we courted and were married within a year. Meeting Raphael’s family, I was once more swept off ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sooner arrived than it had come under the control and guidance of a new set of tribal chiefs, with Lord Northcliffe and the editor of Tit-Bits at its head. There had rapidly come into being what John Carey describes as ‘an alternative culture which bypassed the intellectual and made him redundant’. It was a culture that used itself up as it went along, but ...”