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“... instructed French bureaucrats to write the crucial Greek application for fresh funds and who is keen to present himself (not least to his own left) as the man who prevented Grexit. For a brief moment in July, as Paris and Rome rallied to the Greek cause, it seemed that Tsipras’s strategy of dividing Europe – and even breaking the link between France and ...”

“... every appearance of relish. Maybe he did do that in public – the Derek and Clive dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without ...”

“... religious and philosophical convictions’. (It is little wonder that the Liberal Democrats are so keen on the document, since it is exactly the sort of election manifesto that a lawyer might produce on their behalf.) Even from its Strasbourg base, and qualified though the property right is, the Convention has already exerted a powerful influence on the new ...”

“... of that kind. Despite maudlin attention to her adolescent vulnerability – she is endlessly keen to tell us how gauche she was as a young woman, how lacking in confidence, how unprotected, weak and shy – Mahoney seems unable, after twenty years, to relate the enmity towards Hellman to what was patently a profound sense of being unmothered, un ours mal ...”

“... he did that was new. Sluga tells us that he was the first analytical philosopher, but he is so keen to discover sources for his ideas, and so imprecise at distinguishing one idea from another, that he omits to explain what distinguishes analytical philosophy from that of other schools, or what it was that Frege said that made him the originator of a new ...”

“... it could be seen as dishonourable for the king to receive ‘pay’. Indeed, because he seemed too keen to fix tributary obligations, Herodotus says the Persians labelled Darius the ‘commodity trader’: kapelos. Perhaps because of this anxiety, even in the Empire’s last years revenue was partly imagined not as a fee paid in minas and shekels and ...”

“... have appealed much to Leavis either, but they do offer graphic additional proof in support of Peter Ackroyd’s assertion in his 1984 biography of Eliot that ‘when he allowed his sexuality free access, when he was not struggling with his own demons, it was of a heterosexual kind’: When my tall girl sits astraddle on my lap, She with nothing on and I ...”

“... instincts: ‘You’re a grand girl, Prudence, and I’d like to eat you.’ She seems pretty keen on the idea.Black  Mischief draws on Waugh’s time as a foreign correspondent sent to cover the coronation of Haile Selassie, after which he went on to visit Kenya, Uganda and other places – experiences he wrote up in Remote People, one of several good ...”

“... dwellings: the fire was evidence that regulations were being ignored by a construction industry keen to maximise profit. In August 2016, there was another fire at a tower block in Shepherd’s Bush. The London Fire Brigade wrote to every borough council in May 2017 and told them they needed to re-risk-assess their buildings in the light of the fire, but few ...”

“... mostly wind farm or vineyard. At the outer tip of the peninsula, the seventh-century chapel of St-Peter-on-the-Wall, built on the site of a Roman fort, has for company the austere concrete box of a decommissioned power station. The ancient oak trees at Mundon Hall were already beginning to die when Warner first saw them; the trunks still stand in spindly ...”

“... courage so that one begins to feel the portrait of Cromwell is as skewed as Robert Bolt’s (or Peter Ackroyd’s) is of More and for the same reason, both men human and therefore venial when embosomed in their respective families. Set against this massive work one’s objections seem petty, and it’s a tribute to the power of the novel that one discusses ...”

“... voters; b. heavily represented in certain constituencies, such as the famous Basildon; and c. keen readers of the Sun. On the day of the 1992 general election the Sun ran a headline saying: ‘IF KINNOCK WINS TODAY, WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE BRITAIN TURN OUT THE LIGHTS.’ After the result it ran another headline saying: ‘IT’S THE SUN WOT WON ...”

“... I had some kind of heart problem and therefore wasn’t allowed to do games, which I was very keen on.All games?Well, soccer particularly.Cricket?Not so much. I liked cricket but I was never any good at it. I wasn’t allowed to play games because of this so-called heart problem. It was something I got after I’d had scarlet fever, a sort of follow-up to ...”

“... to the apex of the huge new temple of Zeus at Olympia itself, the closest thing to a pagan St Peter’s: a gilded Victory stood on a shield, with an inscription, since rediscovered, commemorating the battle. The Athenians must have bristled at the fact that a monument of their military humiliation was on display for eternity in just about the most ...”

“... when I asked what a man of his eminence was doing in a crowded, chaotic hospital. He was a keen Chelsea supporter and in between carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine ...”