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“... and a commentator on Wordsworth’s oeuvre in its best years, 1797-1805. Another British critic, David Pirie, writes in The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness from a point of view which often resembles Jonathan Wordsworth’s. Pirie’s book is less obviously biographical in its orientation, yet in the end its goal ...”

“... Jean Taylor met Peter Medawar when they were students. When she married him she therefore knew that he was an extremely able biologist, but she cannot have foreseen what an energetic polymath she was attaching herself to. Medawar’s ability led at first to frequent moves to better jobs, with consequent house-hunting, and to much travel, on which she accompanied him, to lecture and attend conferences ...”

“... as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was by then at work on, Mays outlined in a 1996 lecture what he meant by his ...”

“... Early on, Jones mounts a pre-emptive defence against an accusation he knows is coming. When David Aaronovitch smarmily remarks, one Oxbridge-educated staff journalist to another, ‘here we are, having our elite discussion,’ Jones tells the reader: ‘Some will claim that I am, myself, a member of the establishment. But it is not someone’s ...”

“... responsible for Julian’s fondness for country squirely pursuits. There’s a good description by David Garnett of Julian beagling at Cambridge: he was ‘far bigger, noisier and more raggedly dressed than any of his companions … bursting with happy excitement … Late in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped ...”

“... people trying to ‘adopt’ Coe. Television viewers can see the process at work in the person of David Coleman, who maintains, on camera, what comes across as a flirtatiously bantering relationship with ‘Seb’. Coe may be inured to it by now, but as his book records, he has been embarrassed in the past: ‘To cap it all, [Frank] Bough had signed off the ...”

“... usual bleating of the middle classes’. I go to bed depressed only to wake and find Madsen Pirie, also from the Adam Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have ...”