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“... on a saltmarsh, somewhere on the Northumbrian coast. Nearby are a church, a nunnery, a folly, a Hall and an iron-works. All of these buildings, but especially the yellow house, which faces the sea, are obliged to withstand the battering of strong winds blowing from the north-east. At the yellow house live Polly’s Aunt Mary and Aunt Frances, both too ...”

“... Lewis did in 1914: ‘What balls!’ So even given the participation of Tom Stoppard, Rebecca Hall and Benedict Cumberbatch, it was surprising to see a Ford adaptation given five hours on BBC2. Ford was last unloosed in this way in 1981, when Julian Mitchell adapted The Good Soldier for Granada Television. That film – starring Jeremy Brett, another ...”

“... anything in the world. So when Mr Paul Dacre picked Rothermere’s Daily Mail in preference to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction was that it was like choosing to be King of Ruritania instead of King of England. But Sir Perry has built his career on telling us that the country is going to the dogs. So after mature consideration, he ...”

“... shelves in free facilities? Or as something equivalent to ‘pay-per-view’ TV, with Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch or Don King calling the shots? If you subscribe to a printed journal and then stop doing so, at least you have your back numbers. ‘Unsubscribe’ from an electronic database and you have nothing. ‘Access denied’ – the bleakest of electronic ...”

“... after his father’s disgrace. It was a way to get Mayor Bloomberg to answer his calls and Rupert Murdoch to invite him aboard his yacht. Kushner was always nice to me. He kept me around and when I resigned thanked me for doing a good job. One week the job involved rewriting a sex column written by a friend of his wife, Ivanka Trump. The next week it ...”

“... Gallery basement, seventy-odd likenesses of the artist have been brought together. Its central hall, holding more than a dozen of the late self-portraits, compactly presents the case to be made for Rembrandt. The appeal of these paintings stems from our capacity to empathise with the subject. As we turn to the portraits, the subject’s eyes draw ours into ...”

“... their Utopian endeavours, for reasons well summarised by Leonard Elmhirst, founder of Dartington Hall School: ‘they disregarded sound economics, they followed some ethical or theoretical principle too rigorously, or they attempted to isolate themselves too completely from the social and economic world around them.’ Above all, Utopians have usually been ...”

“... where’s your sense of humour? It’s only a joke.’7 May. On the TV news footage of Stuart Hall arriving for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he manages this without much help, which is ...”

“... for the concept of men working together in conditions of hardship and mutual trust, a vision that Rupert Brooke might have enjoyed: the rough male kiss of tarpaulins. If, for whatever reason, Reynolds needed to move down his own self-appointed social ladder, he had already slipped a few rungs, for The Holy Mountain is not, as I had assumed before reading ...”

“... the programmed reflex of hissing and snarling which would arise from the prescribed corners of the hall. He tells briefly here of his own background in Gravesend, the disabled father, the loving and loved mother, the evacuation to Canada during the war, the admiration for Gravesend’s original and idealistic MP Richard Acland, the bottomless contempt for his ...”

“... off his backside have made him what he is (anyone can do it); that he and his family live in Rupert Brooke’s home, the Old Vicarage, Grantchester. He has also, we are vaguely aware, some kind of yeoman, military ancestry (the archers at Crécy?). He purveys a kind of Englishness that protests too much, as though it had been devised by a Germany spy ...”

“... down Parliament, i.e. proroguing, which I got in one.7 July. I am a messy eater, messy altogether Rupert would say, and getting more so by the day. I’m what my mother used to call ‘a mullocks’ and once did a recital in the Double Cube room at Wilton in a velvet suit with my flies open. These days I prepare, or am prepared, for meals in an ...”

“... and ideologically driven’. In September, the Tory civil libertarian David Davis told Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, an unlikely place to hear a defence of unions, that ‘there are bits of [the bill] which look OTT, like requiring pickets to give their names to the police force. What is this? This isn’t Franco’s Britain.’ The next day, the ...”

“... quotation. Can Zappa’s long career, roots in hardcore Fifties labels, finishing in the concert hall, survive Watson’s fan-from-hell, line-by-line viva? Because that’s the heart of the project: improvisations on the improvisations, a speed freak’s rush through the entire discography. (I mean, of course, you’d have to be chewing crystal to keep up ...”

“... of the Edwardian ‘knut’ (a more philistine version of the dandy and a stock figure of music-hall fun), he explains the two forces behind the knut’s demise: younger sons of the aristocracy being forced to work and the passing of the spat. The First World War would be a better answer but it’s exactly the sort of explanation that’s out of place in ...”