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“... and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes comes across as a more diverse poet than I remembered, and in many ways a more sympathetic and engaging presence. But it’s true that a good many of his poems ...”

“... Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 – characteristically there is no date on the letter – he exults in the wild weather:Edna, I’ve seen rain and I tell you this isn’t rain, – a steady river, well laced with ice, tempest and thunder, covers all this land, and what isn’t concrete has reverted to original chaos of mud water fire and air ...”

“... only playing bit-parts in the story, and this includes the victor of the by-election, Simon Hughes, who makes his one-line appearance on page 148. ‘Simon Hughes is an average Liberal candidate with all the political deficiencies this implies.’ For most of Tatchell’s anticipated audience his will appear adequate ...”

“... made by the editors in the leading essay, which many of the contributors take up. Stanley Benn and Gerald Gaus suggest that the discomfort of liberal thinking on the public-private distinction arises because liberals use two distinct conceptual frameworks. The first, individualist framework takes as private what is done, expressed or owned by particular ...”

“... Mark Felt, a Hoover loyalist and associate director of the FBI. Hoover plays a central role in Ken Hughes’s gripping investigation, Chasing Shadows, which takes as its point of departure the only break-in ordered by Nixon on 2658 hours of tape: not at Watergate, but at a liberal think-tank, the Brookings Institution. The burglary never took place, despite ...”

“... be enough. (Kray being the Anglicised form of Krähe, the German for ‘crow’. Tell that to Ted Hughes.) The Bethnal Green labyrinth was still guarded at each of its four corners by pub signs bearing the portraits of birds, but the missing tie had undone all the familial superstitions. Reg was divided from Ron. The chicken-entrail voodoo of the Twins had ...”

“... historians vied with each other to compose panegyrics to him. The biography written by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, said that Alfred disproved once and for all the thesis that Christianity was ‘no faith for fighters’: while the Vikings at Ashdown passed the night before the battle singing the ‘Death-Song of Ragnar ...”

“... The belief underlies his veneration for the great ‘talking heads’ like Lord Clark and Robert Hughes, as in a more general way it underlies his love affair with British TV ‘culture’ when it is not merely mausoleum-like. Clearly James’s feeling for British culture is that of the outsider who can dissimulate an insider’s manner, but who will never ...”

“... invoking of economists from Keynes to the present day. Rather we should invoke the memory of Sir Gerald Nabarro, who used ribaldry, anomalies and anachronisms to make people laugh – and once a measure has become the subject of laughter its days are numbered; How many canvassers will be required to keep the poll-tax register up to date? Answer: 70 in ...”

“... but is not very often funny; Garland can be quite sharp, but his drawing is both fussy and crude. Gerald Scarfe is essentially a caricaturist; Marc and Osbert Lancaster are purveyors of one-line gags. The only comparison is with Vicky; he very nearly reaches Low’s level of political acuity and wit but his drawings are much slighter and his characterisation ...”

“... has been more a chaos of archives than of mind. After the Second World War, the younger composer Gerald Finzi began amalgamating scattered collections – made by Marion Scott, the Gurney family, Ivor’s Gloucester friend John Haines, Vaughan Williams and others – into a central archive. The process continued after Finzi’s death in 1956. Neither Gurney ...”

“... a jihad. The Arab and Kurdish tribes attacked British troops, and the famed Arabist Colonel Gerald Leachman was killed. A Times leader asked how long Britain would impose on Iraq’s population ‘an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want’. T.E. Lawrence, who had helped to muster the Arab tribes for ...”

“... Dragula. But as soon as we try to settle on any particular issue the discussion is superficial. Gerald, in Women in Love, is ‘an Alberich figure’ whose beauty ‘makes him into a Siegfried’, while Axel Heyst in Victory ‘moves Tristan-like to his own destruction’. We are warned, in a hazily vacuous fashion, that the music of ‘the German ...”

“... to support the Jews against the Arabs’, and a long memory is needed to recall the days when what Gerald Kaufman calls ‘the beautiful democratic Israel’ was revered by liberals, the New Statesman hero-worshipped Ben-Gurion as a model social democrat and the left barely knew that the Palestinians existed. That sentiment persisted until the 1967 war. Even ...”

“... up to the south door, only later realising it wasn’t lichen but chewing gum. 23 March. That Ted Hughes should have got into Poets’ Corner ahead of Larkin wouldn’t have surprised Larkin, though he must surely have a better claim. Two deans back, and not long after Larkin’s death, I remember Michael Mayne saying that Larkin had earned his place on the ...”