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“... of the Good Friday Agreement is marked at the beginning of April. The Clintons, Tony Blair, George Mitchell and Bertie Ahern were all expected to make an appearance. Recently it seemed that a deal was about to be made. May and Varadkar flew in to Belfast on 12 February, ready to welcome it. But it soon became clear that the talks were in deep trouble, so the ...”

“... readers, encouraged some novelists almost to usurp the short story’s usual dimensions. When Ian McEwan moved on from short-story writing, it was to produce a first "novel", The Cement Garden (1978), not much in excess of one hundred pages.’ Ah, so that is why McEwan’s novels are so short. What layers of evasion are hidden in that careful verb ...”

“... in Nashville, the home of the Grand Ole Opry, the opening programme featured Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell; other guests included Merle Haggard, Mama Cass, Odetta, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Judy Collins, Burl Ives and Kris Kristofferson. The show first aired in September 1969; in February of that year Cash was busy recording with Dylan (they duet, kind ...”

“... a prospect. ‘The country presented upon the whole a repulsive appearance,’ the Reverend John Mitchell wrote of Ayrshire in 1780, recalling a rural world, not that long gone, of clogged ditches and treeless scrub, with rough tracks that led across bog and moor to scatterings of cottages with turf roofs and unglazed holes for windows.These ...”

“... least architecturally, is St Mary’s, a medieval parish church with a graveyard and alms-houses. Ian Nairn described it as a ‘huge surprise in the endless late Victorian bow fronts of London-across-the-Lea … as diverse as the characters in a saloon bar’. I went to a service there a couple of years ago but slunk away when the tambourines were handed ...”

“... throughout the party: he was elected to the NEC in 1978, ahead of Barbara Castle and displacing Ian Mikardo. He deliberately eschewed office, beyond serving with mutual embarrassment for a year as Michael Foot’s PPS in 1974, and when Callaghan offered him a job (under Hattersley!) he preferred to hold himself free to oppose the Government’s devolution ...”

“... cause to resort to arms, and always found the arguments to justify it. It is not so long ago that Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, invited the media to a night-time parade of hundreds of his supporters as they waved their gun licences and threatened, in the name of democracy and the Protestant people, to use their weapons if Britain tried ...”

“... picked them up from school or got them up for breakfast: these jobs were done for a while by Bob Mitchell, Michael’s ‘friend’, an American with the whitest teeth Corin had ever seen. Perhaps the strange atmosphere Michael Redgrave created in the household, the moodiness and semi-secrecy, was a good education for an actor. Corin’s first ...”

“... of violence was itself problematic, though not all of them would have been as shameless as Ian Paisley was when the first ceasefire was announced, claiming that Protestants now faced ‘the worst crisis in Ulster’s history since the setting up of the state’. Trimble puts it well in one of the many excellent speeches and articles in this ...”

“... the one Prince song that might fit comfortably in the catalogue of his long-term muse, Joni Mitchell. You can easily imagine mid-1970s Joni using the line ‘a long-fought civil war’ to describe some wounding amour. On 16 April 2016, five days before his death, Prince stopped off at a local record store and bought new copies of Stevie Wonder’s ...”

“... a degree thinking, the same kind of thoughts as the politicians who are likely to appoint you.’ Ian Blair, Met commissioner between 2005 and 2008, wrote in his memoirs that politicians want the police to be ‘street butlers’, called on ‘when required and invisible the rest of the time’. The commissioner is accountable to both the mayor of London and ...”

“... might have taken the heat out of the situation. Shortly after leaving Number Ten, Churchill told Ian Gilmour that immigration from the West Indies was ‘the most important subject facing this country but I cannot get any of my ministers to take any notice’ – although quite a few were no keener on Britain becoming ‘a magpie nation’ than Churchill ...”

“... Jeremy in December 1954, at the end of our first term, when the editor-designate of Isis, Adrian Mitchell, appointed me as the next term’s deputy news editor and Jeremy as one of his two Union reporters (the other being Christopher Driver). I knew him by reputation. There were people quite as clever as Jeremy, several of them his friends, but somehow word ...”

“... Eliot). As a reviewer and essayist, he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High ...”

“... I watched it on my own. When you do that you concentrate harder and it takes more out of you, as Ian Hamilton said: ‘I don’t play football any more, but you should see me watch it.’ Underlying this is the point that a football match isn’t a spectacle but an experience: you don’t look at it, you live through it. This was England’s best performance ...”