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“... voice – once richly modulated, now trembly. In 1971 he agreed to act in The Old Boys by William Trevor at the Mermaid; the crew fitted him with an invisible prompter attached to an earpiece. At the first public performance the prompter malfunctioned, sending out a loud hissing, leaving both Redgrave and the audience in a state of high anxiety. The next day ...”

“... with the kith-and-kin brigade, his proposal was probably a good deal more sensible than Harold Wilson’s advance and vacuous pledge never to use force at all. Thorpe himself enjoyed extraordinarily good relations with the Labour Prime Minister, who even tried clumsily to ride to his rescue with allegations of a South African ‘plot’ when the Scott ...”

“... but assures her that ‘it will be splendid ... to pass with such companions as I have.’ Dr Wilson, according to his obituary in the Times, ‘beautifully lit up the wastes’, and Scott, in his last message, found in the tent with the three bodies, declared: ‘We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake, I do not regret this journey, which ...”

“... that was a sort of martyrdom too. It would be unkind, in this context, to recall that when Hugh Trevor-Roper reviewed Waugh’s life of Campion, the headline was ‘Twice Martyred’, but, if there is a library in Purgatory, Stannard’s book, with its frequent grammatical solecisms, its plodding attempts at psychiatry and its crude view of the class ...”

“... makes me remember when I was a boy and the series in, I think, the Hotspur or the Wizard about Wilson. Wilson was a tall sinewy man of indeterminate age, modest, taciturn, mysterious, who in a typical episode would bring off some amazing feat of endurance – running a vast distance in a seemingly impossible ...”

“... figure. She was the middle daughter of a Munich schoolteacher and a former seamstress, Hugh Trevor-Roper called her ‘a historical disappointment’ on the grounds that she played ‘no role in the decisions that led to the worst crimes of the century’. Would a Lady Macbeth have been less ‘disappointing’? In contrast to Magda Goebbels and other ...”

“... with comedy as well as pathos. At times I was reminded of Compton-Burnett, and often of William Trevor. But the lines that kept on coming into my head were from another brooder on things that might have been, on wrong choices, on ruffled dignity:                      no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of ...”

“... attitudes about elite culture, make the top-down instruction provided with such grumpy relish by Wilson problematic. But the chief reason is that the academy won: it was not writers who changed literary criticism, but academic criticism that changed literary criticism. It made it, precisely, more academic. Theory, metalled with its own unforgiving ...”

“... of traditional working-class culture to a summit of influence in the mid-20th century.’ Yet Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook don’t mention sport at all in A World Still to Win, their eloquent but also irritating and unconvincing tract on the ‘reconstruction of the post-war working class’. For them, it seems, the working class must be ...”

“... 1979,’ though he would have seemed a likely Labour supporter before that, especially during the Wilson ‘white heat of technology’ years. As with some others of his generation, an early anti-Communism seems to have mutated into an enthusiasm for ‘liberalisation’ that could appear to neglect or downplay the systemic injustices inherent in market ...”

“... about the situation – & perhaps a little more than all,’ he murmured side-of-mouth to Edmund Wilson late in 1957. ‘There is a (secret) Russian text in Oxford, in the keeping of the sisters of the poet: they guard it like Cerberi … I have (secretly) got a microfilm of the Russian text to the Widener Library for safe-keeping, but they are not supposed ...”

“... for the next significant attempt to fashion a more open and democratic national identity. The Wilson Administration’s liberalising legislation on race relations, gender equality and homosexuality takes pride of place in his account, alongside the Open University and the new wave of BBC comedy and drama (Dad’s Army, Monty Python, Dennis Potter). This ...”

“... showed a good deal more confidence, and their work transcends mere period interest. In Angus Wilson’s first novel, Hemlock and After (1952), fellow gay writers and readers found their world described with a liberating candour and naturalness new to British literary fiction; Parker excerpts a climactic scene in which the married but homosexual writer ...”