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“... the works of Shakespeare. In The Literature and Art of the Empire (1924), Major A.A. Longden and Edward Salmon claimed that Cranmer’s prophecy supplied ‘proof of Shakespeare’s confidence in England’s destiny’, while for J.A.R. Marriott, writing in 1918, it helped show that to Shakespeare, ‘as to other Elizabethans, England was something more than ...”

“... by publishers too, with albums of ‘Songs for Empire Day’. Then there was the coronation of Edward VII, his funeral eight years later, the coronation of George V, and the outbreak of war in 1914. All these events could be and often were commemorated by schools in song, and the Tonic Sol-fa movement, with its concentration on singing in unison, was ...”

“... going to be a delay. I hadn’t looked at the book in front of me in more than thirty years – Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his two convention pieces from 1968 – and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on a sentence: ‘The reporter was a literary man – symbol had the power to push him into actions more heroic than ...”

“... not where it should be,’ he kept saying. We eventually found the church, which had a Norman nave and was therefore unlikely to have moved since the Ordnance Survey landed its symbol on the Landranger map.Thinking back on this, I wonder whether my father was already in the early stages of dementia. He was only in his mid-fifties, and it was a ...”

“... and about President Johnson and war. It has the refrain: ‘Anywhere, but somewhere else.’ Edward Hopper’s superb American painting Early Sunday Morning – shop fronts, drawn blinds, heavy sleepers to be imagined behind them – is a there and nowhere else: Lowell wakes to a vista of elsewheres. ‘O to break loose’: the poem opens with a salmon ...”

“... side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paul Johnson or Norman Stone, however infallible, will only go so far; while on the other, the lights of the New Criterion or Public Interest shine brighter in the reputable British mirror than they do more nakedly at home. The result is a formula that makes for a livelier ...”

“... of the week, the month and the year. Inmates shout over the partitions, requesting updates.Lulu Norman has done well by BineBine’s original, as Linda Coverdale did by Jelloun’s. Both books belong to a small corpus of detention narratives, fact and fiction, set in the Hassan era. Most, including Diouri’s memories of Dar el-Mokri, are stories we’d ...”

“... to the editor of the TLS about a fairly neutral review of a collection on Palestine edited by Edward Said and myself. I remember the huge row he forced, at the offices of Index on Censorship of all places, concerning an essay by Noam Chomsky which happened to mention in passing that Israel, under Weizmann’s Presidency, was only admitted to the UN on ...”

“... his name and wrote ‘Robert’ while telling him to keep up the good work. His form teacher, Mr Norman, said that ‘Ronnie’s attitude and standard of work is slipping. I hope that he takes note of what has been said to him recently. He is always pleasant and happy.’ Ronnie seemed like a person ready for the world outside and he left school as soon as ...”

“... where, without conquering the proud hearts, or gaining the warm affections of the Irish, the Anglo-Norman barons, who, with mailed hearts as well as backs – neither civilising nor enriching the country – resided amongst us.’It is clear that Wilde is aware of the difficulties inherent in any effort to describe the Irish landscape with political ...”

“... A year later, in April 1974, it appeared, coinciding happily with nationwide labour troubles and Edward Heath’s three-day week; and of course it was large and plush – and expensive to buy. I wanted something that looked good. I think now it stands up pretty well in terms of its appearance.People objected precisely on the grounds that it looked too good ...”

“... lifetime. According to Hugo Young, Thatcher had to be talked into Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of populist policies. No wonder Thatcher baulked. Right to Buy violated basic Thatcherite values: that ...”

“... he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader. Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of ...”