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“... St Ives studio. At the start, we find Hepworth and the other carvers of her generation – Henry Moore, Ursula Edgcumbe, John Skeaping – making common cause with a slightly older cohort, Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill, Gaudier-Brzeska, Elsie Henderson, Alan Durst. In works produced both before and after World War One, they ...”

“... tidily together. Not the least of the editor’s achievements is his success in getting D.C. Moore to write two essays which, while still characteristically eccentric, are also uncharacteristically lucid. And, as befits a book on a subject widely and deeply researched, it has a more solid and scholarly feel to it than did The Victorian City. Flimsy ...”

“... and President Reagan in particular. Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast. ‘Conrad and Me’, a script which I hone and burnish in slack moments, has the following points of mild interest. In the summer of 1985, I wrote an ...”

“... no further encouragement. For one thing they were responsible for Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which Alan Rickman plays a ghost who tries to help his widow (Juliet Stevenson) come to terms with his untimely death. One of the tricks he tries is to recite Pablo Neruda’s ‘Dead Woman’ (‘I shall stay alive,/because above all things you wanted me’) – a ...”

“... people have for me. In the local post office where I go every morning for the papers I am ‘Mr Alan’, though Zaiman with his filmstar looks just calls me ‘Alan’ (and occasionally pats my arm). The English lady (from Kent) in Shepherd Foods who wears a burka calls me ‘Mr Bennett’ and because it’s the way ...”

“... where I was appearing with my colleagues and co-writers Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe.It was a smash hit, with every night the audience studded with celebrities, and accordingly at one performance there was the queen. My particular tour de force in the second half was an Anglican sermon, which always went well. Less ...”

“... its sound-bite novellas by fruitfly celebrities, is no longer the sole generator of content. Alan Moore, with Voice of the Fire (1996), has done the job for Northampton. One of Drummond’s collaborators, Mark Manning, demonises working-class Leeds in Crucify Me Again. The centre is broken and Drummond relishes its discomfort. In a piece called In ...”

“... collection and what happened to it would have been welcome.And then there is the first-born son, Alan Clark, the military historian and Tory politician. To find this ferocious attack dog prowling in the castle where once the author of Civilisation delivered his ‘credo’ and paused to pat, with pensive benevolence, a sculpture of a mother and child by ...”

“... affectionate. Unashamed of his emotions altogether, as I sat next to him at the funeral of Alan Bates’s son Tristan when he wept throughout. I haven’t always felt so kindly, as when he wrote plays in the 1970s I was very jealous of him (as, I believe, was Pinter). He could run up a play in a week or two, generally when he wasn’t getting anywhere ...”

“... me.‘Aren’t you famous?’‘Well I can’t be, can I, if you don’t know my name.’‘It’s Alan something.’‘Yes.’‘From Scarborough?’‘No.’‘So which Alan are you?’‘I’m another Alan.’‘Are you just a lookalike?’‘Well, you could say so.’He pats my arm ...”

“... flush out the devout, the fluent genuflection before entering the pew the first indicator. Charles Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service ...”

“... soul and R&B. Sam Phillips did not invent rock ’n’ roll, a term coined by the Cleveland DJ Alan Freed in the early 1950s. Black musicians did in the 1940s, as the big black swing bands were dying off and smaller ensembles took over, offering stripped-down, up-tempo music with a repetitive beat, honking saxophones showcasing the vocalists, boogie-woogie ...”

“... In Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, Dorothy Moore – a retired music-hall chanteuse and the wife of a moral philosopher called George Moore – is going dotty in her bedroom. The precipitating cause is a televised fight between the first two astronauts to land on the Moon about who gets to go back home on a damaged lunar ascent module that can carry only one ...”

“... that intrigues.8 June. Man overheard in Oxford Street: ‘Can that cow shop! Jesus!’18 June. Alan Clark’s Diaries mention being smiled on in the lobby by the Prime Minister. Idly opening Chips Channon’s Diaries I find a similar note, re Chamberlain. Courts do not change whether the court is at Westminster, Versailles or even British Airways, Lord ...”

“... about his own high moral purpose. All this adds up to his being, in the phrase of Charles Moore, ‘the most pointlessly combative person in human history’. At one point someone at the Downing Street switchboard, ‘at the end of a not untypical day’, makes the mistake of asking him how he is, and Campbell replies that he feels ‘both homicidal ...”