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“... it an ‘X Factor-style talent search’. More than 1000 people applied (10,000 according to Philip Dodd on Night Waves, though I think he must have misread the script). The numbers took the organisers by surprise and led them to extend the judging period, but they shouldn’t have done: the AHRC ought to know better than anyone that academics these ...”

“... But, apart from Brian Doyle’s account of the early years of the English Association and Philip Dodd’s brief discussion of plans for a National Theatre, we learn nothing about them: about the reasons for their establishment, about the way they worked. The preference for mapping over archaeology favours an emphasis on continuity. Maps tell you ...”

“... there many readers have an extra difficulty about the miracles. A brief paragraph about Sir Philip Sidney, thrown in as an extra, does more to make the position clear. Lying wounded on a battlefield, the aristocratic young officer was brought a cup of water, but handed it on to a wounded trooper, saying: ‘Thy need is greater than mine.’ Kermode ...”

“... leader can help anyone who seriously needs help. The answers seem to be yes, no and no. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of the Master is remarkable because it makes charisma seem so unsteady and so complicated. He is lordly, mischievous, scoundrelly, conniving, bullying, petulant, perfectly in control, half out of control, always slithering ...”

“... return to the ‘little’ author I was in Suffolk for almost ten years while working on Monty? Philip Ziegler and others have written kindly about the final Monty volume, hoping that I will not abandon writing. I won’t: I have finished the manuscripts of two short novels since finishing the first draft of Monty last summer, one steamy, one very ...”

“... Senate of Lilliput’ in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and the ‘Last Solemn Declaration’ of Dr Dodd, the ‘macaroni parson’, who was hanged for forgery. Johnson’s style was as distinctive as his body, transforming the King’s English – which in his Dictionary he regulated, mapped and ultimately failed to control – into his own Latinate ...”

“... at one rehearsal. ‘Really,’ said the veteran of Holding Out the Apple: ‘Do you mean Plinth Philip or Plinth Charles?’ But I would guess now that it was Oedipus, though rated a failure with Gielgud somewhat out of place in it, that gave him a new lease of life. He has always been a self-conscious man, his shyness masked by a bubbling stream of ...”