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“... despised the very notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s ...”

“... not a feature of Parliament in the 18th century.11 February. A piece in the TLS by Laura Freeman about how hunger was reflected in the novels of the postwar period. I suppose it’s because it’s to do with novels (and therefore middle class and upwards), but it hardly relates to my own childhood memories. I have no particular memories of wartime ...”

“... again, a rhythm that sent pulses of cash-rich fishermen racing to the fleshpots and trinketries of Freeman Street, the backbone of the Victorian town, which ran from the docks to the Marsh districts where the fishermen lived. They would walk away from the cashier at the docks, get into a cab and let the meter run through all their sprees and benders and ...”

“... He was cross when Bradford reciprocated the indifference, and delayed making its famous son a freeman of the city, but he was most masterful and most himself when away from his native dales. Not so Lewis, for whom the legacy of Protestant Ireland was probably the most significant thing in his imaginative life, more even than Norse mythology and the epic ...”

“... own body as the fundamental basis of all other property rights, it also specifies that ‘every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.’A subsequent passage in Tim Knox’s potted history shows that the estate improvements over which Susanna Ashley-Cooper presided seventy years ...”

“... quantity, and more for observation than vision. But in 1927, 45 years after Trollope’s death, Michael Sadleir published a reassessment. He argued that Trollope was a writer with the rare gift of being able to produce memorable books without writing memorable sentences, and probe depths without seeming to move beyond the surface. Interest revived; the ...”

“... unqualified support. But then, so did the subsequent resignations of Aneurin Bevan, John Freeman and Harold Wilson, which were in protest at the immediate consequences of that budget. There are, to be sure, regular public and private dishonesties, of the kind that every professional politician is expected to commit, and for which he may hope for ...”

“... The Maltese Falcon. That’s the principle of the detective story, the idea that (in the words of Freeman Wills Crofts’s detective, the stolid Inspector French) ‘there’s always something behind everything.’ The thing about the something behind everything is that it’s not easy to see what it is. Which is the reason that, in the wake of ...”

“... minde,’ Gouge writes, ‘and he is as free as his master: for such a seruant is the Lords freeman … he doth after a manner make his seruice free.’ This is what David Evett in Discourses of Service called ‘volitional primacy’ – a paradoxical variant of Stephen Greenblatt’s celebrated ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’, in which a servant’s ...”

“... future be ‘avoiding scholarship on account of inability’. He noted of a damning review by E.A. Freeman of his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age that it ‘ought to humble me’. But it didn’t. On the contrary, he went on and on, and then some. His early Church Principles Considered in Their Results, which he described as ‘a work of very sanguine ...”

“... are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its essential account of exactly what James was doing in his conduct of his career as a ...”

“... epitaphs. Thomas James remembers companions lost in the Northern seas, Matthew Stevenson an ‘Old Freeman’: Upon the ground he laid, all weathers, Not as most men, gooselike on feathers. Elizabeth Thomas covers just about all the angles in ‘A Midnight Thought (on the death of Mrs E.H. and Her Little Daughter, Cast away under London ...”

“... critically important to a celebrated generation of Northern Irish poets, poets like Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Muldoon. These writers were led to him by content but stayed for the style. Auden or Eliot’s influence can be overwhelming for a writer, their tone is so settled, their territory staked out so thoroughly. But a novice poet can wander around ...”

“... aforesaid Nicholas is charged, before us at Westminster on Saturday next after eight days of Saint Michael, to undergo and receive whatever our court should then and there happen to order concerning him in this behalf, and this in no wise omit, upon the peril that may befall, and have there this writ. Witness, Sir John Popham, at Westminster, the eleventh day ...”

“... superiority, to which I’ve never particularly subscribed. I’m happy, even proud, to be a freeman of Leeds, especially since, unlike much of the rest of the county, it was not in favour of Brexit. I hope our favourite restaurant in Leeds, Sous le Nez, will survive lockdown, and we miss the occasional kedgeree at Betty’s in Ilkley. But there is no ...”