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“... a hundred poems, appeared posthumously). The Hardyan blend of stamina, abundance and variety is Dennis Taylor’s starting-point in Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody: not only was his career ‘longer than that of any other Victorian poet, indeed any English poet’, but ‘he wrote poems in more metrical forms than any other major English ...”

“... of Saturday night entertainment. In 1985, 18.5 million people tuned in to watch Steve Davis play Dennis Taylor in the final of the world championship; many of them stayed with it to the end, even though the match finished after midnight. In Running, O’Sullivan blamed snooker’s decline on the banning of tobacco advertising in sport in 2005, and on ...”

“... Without Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian, there would be no Belgrano affair, and doubtless Mr Clive Ponting OBE would be plying his way, ever upwards, in the Ministry of Defence. This is no exaggeration. Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on ...”

“... to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly ...”

“... roles and old man’s roles’. The first claim is at best debatable, the other two simply wrong. Dennis Kay’s biography is altogether more respectable. He has only a dozen pages of notes, but they direct readers to major sources and divergent views. He has not closed his eyes and swallowed everything done in the last decade; but he hasn’t closed his eyes ...”

“... was an out-of-hours architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly ...”

“... the Common Room saw Stevie Smith read her poetry, Gwen Barnard lecture on art and Simon Watson Taylor explain Pataphysics. Dudley Moore played the piano one night and Sean Connery paired up with Bernard Bresslaw for a Eugene O’Neill two-hander. The programme may have leaned more towards the arts than the sciences, but the recitals, screenings and ...”

“... it often seems a lifetime, so crowded has his premiership been with crises of one sort or another. Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon not unreasonably, therefore, think this the moment to assess his prime ministerial career; the result is The Major Effect, a collection of 26 essays by a distinguished group of commentators – including the editors. Five years ...”

“... pages and focusing on high-profile trials. James Canham Read was hanged for the murder of Florence Dennis, having slept with both her and her sister. His last words, according to the Evening News, were ‘Will it hurt?’ This was perhaps a question to which the answer was ‘Yes’. In retrospect, all these gambits seem to have been practice runs for the ...”

“... It’s Only Ray Parlour (Arsenal midfielder, 1992-2004); Stillness and Speed: My Story by Dennis Bergkamp (Arsenal striker, 1995-2006); Addicted by Tony Adams (Arsenal centre-back, 1983-2002); and, now, Arsène Wenger’s My Life in Red and White. Arsène Wenger on the touchline at the Emirates Stadium, 29 March 2014. The Premier League has come ...”

“... with regret to the next time the Speaker of the House of Commons would be obliged to eject Mr Dennis Skinner. The Minister for the Arts, who is also the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and who when neither of those things is the Earl of Gowrie, was referred to at all times as either ‘my noble lord’ or ‘the noble Earl’, or a combination of ...”

“... faces us is what it means to be post-Christian. Thomas Hardy faced up to this in his poems, as Dennis Enright and Patricia Beer have faced up to it since. The more publicised and profitable concerns of their contemporaries seem, by comparison, trivial. How hard it is to live in a post-Christian world – if, that is, one has known what a Christian world ...”

“... last season the cheapest seat on the Kop for a match against top opponents was £45. Lord Justice Taylor’s official report in the wake of Hillsborough documented a class-divided sport, the directors helping themselves to the boardroom buffet while young fans died on the terraces. Taylor recommended that run-down grounds ...”

“... Thank you for keeping still,’ Elizabeth Taylor says to Paul Newman at the end of the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Taylor’s character is thanking Newman for not saying anything when he hears her lying about being pregnant. But ‘Thank you for keeping still’ is also a good summary of Newman’s acting style, especially in his early films, when the main thing required of him was that he display his magnificent torso and his dazzling blue eyes for the audience to drink in their full manly beauty ...”

“... songs from The Lion King and The Little Mermaid. I played them some tunes on my phone. They loved Taylor Swift and Adele, but Kanye only confirmed their worst suspicions about Western decadence. Radiohead was met with confusion and they clearly hated the Pogues, which given the number of patriotic anthems I’d already been subjected to, seemed a bit ...”