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“... ideas. What rival Germanists saw as his eclecticism – his highly successful collaboration with Tom Stoppard in adapting the plays of Schnitzler and Nestroy for the London stage, for instance – was in reality a deliberate policy of dragging the study of German culture out of the ghetto to which the Nazis had condemned it. Stern’s first book, Ernst ...”

“... series must go back a long way: Ted Hughes appeared in the first, and Francis Hope and Tom Stoppard in the second. On the other hand, of the 47 writers who have now appeared, only a very few have become names one recognises. Clearly persistence and luck need to go along with talent. A name which appeared first in Introduction 6 is that of Jim ...”

“... friend Ian Breakwell, whose Diary 1964-1985 has just been published in paperback by Pluto Press.* Tom Stoppard wrote a play called After Magritte which was a leaden travesty of Magritte’s philosophy of art, which set up a fantastically silly tableau and then explained it. Magritte loathed explanations and meanings. When I meet Ian I fight with him over ...”

“... is Peter Ackroyd or that the German epigraph is by Wilhelm Müller or that Arcadia is a play by Tom Stoppard. Patric Dickinson, Felicity Ashbee and David Cecil are among the dozens of names who pass by unnoted and still more are missing from the index. How Fitzgerald came to know Stevie Smith and when it was that T.S. Eliot told her that the staircase ...”

“... Lowe and Richard Briers, and Writers for Europe, whose membership ranged from Agatha Christie to Tom Stoppard. Ogres such as Benn, Paisley and Powell were no match for these recruits. The 1975 referendum has attracted the attention of various political scientists, including the psephologist David Butler and his collaborator the German émigré Europhile ...”

“... wallet in case he should ever be invited on – he never was. In his 1982 play, The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard described the eternal dilemma of choosing records that make you look classy and cultured versus the ones you actually like. (He was rewarded by being invited onto the show three years later.) In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi (Desert Island Discs ...”

“... as does the Blakean title. The Secret Pilgrim comes out at the same time as the Fred Schepsi-Tom Stoppard film of The Russia House. Le Carré and Sean Connery have both had very profitable Cold War careers. But it’s been a long duration. Connery is now so grizzled and ‘gamy’ (as one unkind American critic put it) that one can scarcely imagine ...”

“... a promising direction for a fiction about uncertainty. In his radio play Where are they now? Tom Stoppard gives a character the satisfying chance to complain, with hindsight, of ‘the momentous trivialities and tiny desolations’, the ‘hollow fear of inconsiderable matters’. But Byatt is not having any. While she concurs with, and captures ...”

“... Ballard’s previous books put together, even before it was turned into an Oscar-nominated film by Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. His later career was punctuated by international book tours and lavish TV profiles, and towards the end of his life he had the pleasure of turning down a CBE (‘I might have been tempted had I been entitled to call myself ...”

“... Perhaps it’s a detail that Johnson wrote about poets, while Tynan, with the single exception of Tom Stoppard, prefers performers. Or that some of Johnson’s subjects were obscure, while Tynan’s other four are stars of stage, screen or box – Ralph Richardson, Johnny Carson, Mel Brooks and Louise Brooks. Still, he makes a polished bid for literary ...”

“... world should be a war zone for the driest kind of textual scholarship is an irony with which Tom Stoppard had fun in his play on the life of A.E. Housman, The Invention of Love. The young Housman proposed dozens of emendations to the text of Propertius. An apparent lacuna in Propertius’ highly erotic description of Cynthia provoked Housman, who ...”

“... and revisions and adaptations of Shakespeare have been, from Tate to Aimé Césaire and Tom Stoppard, they have not been carried out in recent years with the same pointed zeal as have the sequels to Austen. In the 20th century dozens of sequels, from Margaret Dashwood, or Interference (a sequel to Sense and Sensibility by Edith Charlotte ...”

“... proletarian populism burned only fitfully. And while both Harold Pinter and (arguably) Tom Stoppard started out as British absurdists, the influence of Beckett across the whole range has been less than in any other European country. John Heilpern says none of this, because he neither knows very much about Osborne’s successors (he thinks ...”

“... Moses Jackson, his unswervingly heterosexual Oxford contemporary – is all-determining. He had, Tom Stoppard wrote, ‘an unremitting, lopsided, lifelong, hopeless constancy to a decent chap who was in no need of it, temperamentally unfitted for it, and never for a moment inclined to call upon it’ – and from whom, in Laurence Housman’s laconic ...”

“... a local council election, with trestle tables, ushers and the proctors taking the votes. One of Tom Bingham’s proposers, I vote for him and no one else, the single transferable vote (another Jenkins inspiration) likely, it’s thought, to favour Bingham’s chief rival, Chris Patten. At the table I hand in my paper to one of the junior proctors, a ...”