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“... be more of this. 23 May. Ros Chatto, my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to ...”

“... paedophile, haunted by his dead sibling David, and animated by his fascination with the Llewellyn-Davies boys whom he met in Kensington Gardens. Jefferson does not pick up on the parallels – the horrible accusation, the sibling psychodrama, the company of children – but she has a lot of time for the idea that we live in a culture that enjoys the oddness ...”

“... of the Kaiser consultant Alain Enthoven was acknowledged in Parliament by the then Tory MP Quentin Davies. ‘The fund-holding practice concept owes something to the system of HMOs in the United States … Elements of the Bill reflect some of the thinking of Professor Enthoven in his famous report and reflect his concept of an internal market.’ Enthoven was ...”

“... that Malvolio’s defects spring from his own hypocrisy and self-love. They are not, as Sir Andrew Aguecheek wants to believe, associated with a particular religious and political alignment in Elizabethan England. Maria’s scrupulousness here about an easy misuse of the term ‘Puritan’ would seem to be Shakespeare’s own. Although critics often ...”

“... Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill ...”

“... Mail test’. (The same metric was adopted by the civil servants making funding decisions in Andrew Mitchell’s now defunct Department for International Development.) Serco was fined £19.2 million last year by the Serious Fraud Office for misconduct in its electronic tagging service for the Ministry of Justice. The wrongdoing is said to have included ...”

“... position themselves as originators or leaders to be followed. The success of Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate consists in the paradox of instructing men to be less obedient, and here’s how.The idea here is that while everyone (animals included) is capable of reaction, only a rarefied minority is capable of genuine action. Action, from this ...”

“... to ingratiate itself with the Soviet Union). The late Robert Maxwell, the publisher, and Nicholas Davies, the former foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, have inconsequential British bit parts in the saga as told by Hersh. But Maxwell’s Jewish origins, his escape from the holocaust, his identification with Israel – he was buried in Jerusalem – and his ...”

“... But then, God bugger me blue, what did that make all the other craps and shags – the Wains, Davies, Hugheses, for Christ’s sake? At least he, Larkin, didn’t show up for readings in a leather jacket. ‘You’ve become what I dreamed of becoming,’ Larkin wrote to Kingsley Amis at a point quite late on in their careers, seeming to mean by this that ...”

“... seen in an examination of two sections dealing with overtly political writings. Nicholas Canny and Andrew Carpenter introduce ‘The Early Planters: Spenser and his Contemporaries’ by reaffirming Spenser’s status as a great poet in the English tradition, and then by redescribing him as an ‘apologist’ for English rule in Ireland, someone whose writing ...”

“... to rise: one can be ‘young’ and ‘promising’ up to 40, a relief for late starters. But Andrew Elliott, in the Trio 4 collection, is ‘only’ 24: the best of these three Northern Irish poets, he is a mellifluous teller of fairytales, though in a downbeat idiom. Fred D’Aguiar, meanwhile, who was born in London but brought up in Guyana, is ...”

“... They were part of the Grosvenor (later Westminster) estate left by the young heiress Mary Davies in the 17th century, together with the Mayfair lands which were the first to be exploited. The story of poor addled Mary as the wellhead of wealth scarcely to be imagined is part of legend. To the admirable Thomas Cubitt goes the major credit for replacing ...”

“... Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not only of scholarship but of rhetoric and of ...”

“... Dylan Thomas’s biographers have mostly thought of him as a big baby – ‘infantile’ is Andrew Lycett’s preferred word, though he has others – who was nothing like as good as he should have been; and whose life, a terrible thing with all its fecklessness and boozing and blathering, was redeemed only by the extraordinary things that were his ...”

“... railway planner at the Strategic Rail Authority and founder of the transport consultancy Steer Davies Gleave, he believes the project is essential for Britain’s future welfare. ‘Do you know what the population of Britain will be in 2085?’ he asks, and then answers his own question: ‘85 million. Where will all those people go? London can only ...”