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“... politics, and he makes much of the newly available diaries of the evangelical minister Billy Graham, who was close to both Johnson and Nixon. Where he differs from conventional interpretations is in his claim that Johnson, with the Cold War and his long-term reputation in mind, secretly supported Nixon and betrayed Humphrey.Johnson’s decision not to ...”

“... In a sense, MacDiarmid’s work parallels the question asked by his Scottish contemporary, W.S. Graham: ‘What is the language using us for?’ Buthlay stresses in his introduction the importance of Gregory Smith’s Caledonian antisyzygy as a paramount interpretative tool in A Drunk Man. We might also point to Gregory Smith’s discussion of the so-called ...”

“... hoarding books rather than cash, and the novel’s excellent jacket-picture by Emma Chichester Clark has a promising glimpse of him peering at a tome, surrounded by towers of unsorted volumes which wait their places on the empty shelves in the gloom beyond. Unfortunately Lamming’s prose never quite measures up to that picture: the book-hoarding ought to ...”

“... Oh, and he also called his wife ‘Filth’, or ‘Philth’. ‘She’s hipposexual,’ he told Graham Greene. You can make your own judgment about all this. Actually, if you’ve read the poems, you probably will already have made your own judgment. To crack open Betjeman’s famously bestselling Collected Poems – ‘the publishing phenomenon of ...”

“... the Perdita theme, set in Colorado. The heavily researched To the Last Man (1922) deals with the Graham-Tewksbury feud in Texas and Arizona. The Wanderer of the Wasteland (1923) is a long and ambitious reworking of the Cain and Abel myth set, as the title implies, in the desert. The Call of the Canyon (1924) pits the values of the effete East against the ...”

“... India a wise and unburdened fellow, just as such lines allowed people to forgive the diarist Alan Clark any number of horrors so long as he raised a smile when he wrote them down. The talent to write poshly is quickly taken as the talent to write well. It remains a kind of honesty that English readers – or English readers of English writers – prize above ...”

“... with the main studio teacher Claude Rogers stuck in the Sappers and the school’s polemicist Graham Bell, shortly to die in air training, berating Coldstream for a lack of radicalism. Coldstream had recently saved a further colleague, Victor Pasmore, from court martial for desertion by leaning on Kenneth Clark to vouch ...”

“... in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got to know Francis when he designed some furniture for my Eccleston Street flat. I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it … In those days ...”

“... when politicians and editorialists (and, at least for the past half-century, the Reverend Billy Graham) start deploying phrases like ‘the healing process’. Let us, they intone, put the past behind us and look to the future. Let us move the country forward and bind up the wounds. Of course, the same politician or cleric or editorialist is capable of ...”

“... the still uncertain John Gielgud. Later in the run he took me out to supper with Cole Lesley and Graham Payn to the Savoy, where we had sausages and mash. Alas, I have no memories of his conversation on either occasion, remembering only how he put me at my ease and seemed much kinder and nicer than I’d been led to expect. 14 April. Watch Grammar School ...”

“... The Shell-Mex advertising campaign, lavishly praised by art critics such as Clive Bell and Kenneth Clark, appeared at a time when motoring was still more or less a luxury pursuit. Yet these initiatives made possible the ‘common culture’ of Britain in the Thirties. A ‘common culture’ is a slippery concept: to what extent does it genuinely need to be ...”

“... that it was altogether too free-form. I rather wish it had been more so, and done on the lines of Graham Norton’s current TV show, so that the priest in charge could have said: ‘All sit ... but remain standing those who had any sort of fling with the deceased.’15 May. Finish reading A Pacifist’s War by Frances Partridge and start reading Stalingrad ...”

“... train was heavily congested and the unaccustomed Tory – who may or may not have been Alan Clark – recoiled from the throng revealed by the opening doors, suggesting that they might do better to walk along the platform to the restaurant car. Jeffrey Archer may have dreamed of routes as straight as an executive jet’s runway, but McKie knows that a ...”

“... that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget David Trevinnick and Graham Riddick, suspended from their jobs as Parliamentary Private Secretaries over allegations that they had each accepted £1000 in return for tabling Parliamentary written questions. The same ‘cash for questions’ controversy also later accounted for two ...”

“... held it back for three or four years) encouraged a spate of ‘grimly honest’ realist dramas. As Graham Greene remarked of one of them, the colliery winding gear, silhouetted against the sky, the pit disaster and the warning siren became as cinematically familiar as the Eiffel Tower or the Houses of Parliament. A.J. Cronin, the best-selling novelist whose ...”