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“... a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the impossible last day of my classes. No news.’ In late 1959, waiting for short story acceptances that would not come, she wrote in her journal: ‘Must not wait for mail as it ruins the day.’ Then the ...”

“... a more overtly political play.There may have been another play early on.A one-acter?Yes, possibly.Peter Dale told me you once produced a play at Oxford, a small piece by Harold Pinter.I had started another magazine at Oxford called Tomorrow. And for its fourth issue I’d written to Pinter. He had just become prominent then, but I’d learned about him ...”

“... enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet afternoons. But it’s no neat line-up. Auty is too reactionary for practically everyone. Serota pleases all of the people at one time or ...”

“... regarding his serial disappointments in love – compounded decades later, when Valerie Wynne-Williams, the third and last of his deep romantic attachments, and 39 years younger, suddenly married. But illness was also retrenchment. It drew a line under his vacillating attempts to fit in with the expectations of others, which were replaced by a ...”

“... get hysterical about Wagner, but the old tropes still surface. Published less than 18 months ago, Peter Conrad’s big book Verdi and/or Wagner happily revisits Nietzsche’s dichotomy between the fog-bound, mephitic, enervating music of the North (Wagner) and the life-giving vitality and pagan health of the music of the Mediterranean – with the difference ...”

“... and some of the best-known contemporary exponents of biography have not contributed: there is no Peter Ackroyd, no Hermione Lee, no Victoria Glendinning, though there are three entries by Claire Tomalin, including Katherine Mansfield and Ellen Ternan, and four by Michael Holroyd, including Augustus John. Given the (exaggerated) claims made for the dictionary ...”

“... my table, where I listen to BBC7’s This Sceptred Isle, a history of England read by Anna Massey, Peter Jeffrey, Christopher Lee and Paul Eddington. Afterwards I take the tray back downstairs to get my midday pills: two Omega 3 tablets, one selenium and one Saw palmetto plus a piece of dark chocolate and a cup of green tea. It probably sounds nicer than I ...”

“... that he must have been whistling. Martha, Lucy, Maureen, Josie … Margaret Martinson Roth née Williams made quite an impact. In The Facts, Roth comes close to saying that the idealistic values instilled in him by his parents delivered him up to Maggie’s manipulations; or rather, he does say so, but then (this being the structural trick of the book) he ...”

“... attention of Facebook’s first external investor, the now notorious Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Again, The Social Network gets it right: Thiel’s $500,000 investment in 2004 was crucial to the success of the company. But there was a particular reason Facebook caught Thiel’s eye, rooted in a byway of intellectual history. In the course of his ...”

“... at some of the A-list names cropping up regularly in All We Know: Maude Adams (the first Peter Pan); the Russian film star Alla Nazimova (a teetering Salomé in the ultra-campy cinematic 1923 version of Wilde’s play); Isadora Duncan, the bisexual modern dancer; the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her Broadway-producer lover Bessie ...”

“... concern. By October 1865, relations between Shewell and the town commissioners’ clerk, George Williams, an indefatigable opponent of the Mythe scheme, had reached the stage of open warfare. Yet in the cosy world of old-time west of England politics, nothing could stop Shewell. In November 1865 he came up for re-election as chairman of the commissioners ...”

“... Béarn, in the borderlands with Spain, his trajectory bears many similarities to that of Raymond Williams, son of a railwayman in the marches of Wales, who was aware of the kinship between them. They shared steep ascents from such backgrounds to elite positions in the academy, and then feelings of acute alienation within the oblivious worlds of ...”

“... Miss S. spends much of her day sitting on the pavement in Parkway, where she has a pitch outside Williams and Glyn’s Bank. She sells tracts, entitled ‘True View: Mattering Things’, which she writes herself though this isn’t something she will admit. ‘I sell them but so far as the authorship is concerned, I’ll say they are anonymous and that’s ...”

“... then, too, there are all my mood-setting ‘highbrow’ CDs – the songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi’s ‘Only a Man Harrowing Clods’ to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an ...”

“... this story, comes towards the end of July 2014. Two separate sources spoke to me of emails between Peter Maddison, director of Assets and Regeneration at the TMO, and Feilding-Mellen and others, discussing the colour and type of fixing for the proposed cladding on Grenfell Tower. At the time, residents were putting some pressure on the TMO and the council’s ...”