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“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”

“... is covered and pierced in many ways, by church steeples, nuclear reactors, safari parks, six-lane highways, ruined monasteries, radio telescopes, wind turbines, landfill sites, golf courses. Mostly, though, it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by ...”

“... make language flow and shine. He comes back, again and again, to a single quotation from the poet David Lunde; one that Griffin, believe it or not, stumbles on while browsing through the racks of Beaucoup Books on Magazine Street: ‘We must learn to put our distress systems into code.’ There it is every time, in every book, the great theme that underlies ...”

“... early days of Motley. They had taken as a studio Chippendale’s old workshop behind St Martin’s Lane, where a gang of actors, led by Gielgud, could generally be found sitting around, gossiping, discussing productions and having tea. With a tea bill that sometimes came to £100 a week, it sounds cosy, cliquey and not the stuff of theatrical revolution, and ...”

“... he ‘never had Protestant neighbours in and out of the house’, never knew ‘cheek-by-jowl, lane-by-field, country-neighbour life’.And yet, when Heaney began to publish poems, ‘I’d gone delving straight away into the sectarian seam’: such a poem as ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ raised ‘a battened-down spirit that wanted to walk ...”

“... and naturally they pretended they hadn’t heard me. Further up Ballygunge Circular Road is the David Hare Training College, named after a 19th-century Scottish watchmaker and fiercely non-evangelical educationist beloved by Bengalis of the time. The place was swarming with convivial-looking policemen. I sat down opposite a man in khaki regalia, with ...”

“... out to be a Spanish chef capable and indeed only too pleased to produce delicious pre-Elizabeth David food for the ravenous Radletts.13 February. ‘God’s honour’ we used to swear as boys. This remembered in the middle of an acute attack of arthritis pain this morning when I’m marooned on the sofa, cold, thirsty but unable to move. ‘I don’t know ...”

“... I’ve worked in, including the Round Reading Room at the old Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. The memoranda rolls on which I spent most of my time were long, thin swatches of parchment about five foot in length and written on both sides. To turn the page required the co-operation and forbearance of most of the other readers at the table, so it would ...”

“... did not long survive her son’s birth, and soon afterwards Ms Woolvine met and married David McCluskie, a plasterer and bricklayer. Terry took McCluskie’s name, though this was never regularised. The family moved to London after the strike at Cammell-Laird, when David McCluskie was finding work hard to come ...”

“... mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of ...”

“... Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood had its premiere at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane on 13 December 1727. It was a romantic tragicomedy in a Spanish setting; the story was from an episode in Don Quixote. Theobald’s statement that it met with ‘universal applause’ is untrue, but it certainly created a buzz ...”

“... civility – attended by men and women anxious to ‘improve’ – rather than of vice. He begged David Garrick to cancel a revival of The Beggar’s Opera at Drury Lane on the grounds that it inflamed young men with the ambition to be highwaymen, and sent, ‘every time it is acted, one additional thief to the ...”

“... not interested in his essential fuel, love. The fruit of all those decades of hard research, two-lane blacktops and ravenous notebooks. She’s like Wittgenstein’s lunch, utterly invariable, and, she’s like your own private third world she arrives and breeds like guinea pigs, ever more progeny and evermore food and the priest cells demand evermore ...”

“... collateral damage. Processions of early morning joggers and a brisk uptake in the generous cycle lane provision signal a lurch in property prices: only the proscriptively young and comfortably situated have the energy to work on self-image and endorphin boosts. The dispersed community of beach drinkers fragmented and transferred a few streets inland. I ...”

“... history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay men, many of them closeted, the ...”