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“... the campaign, as a series of media events contrived to produce a predetermined image. Even when John Major defiantly got out his own soap box, it was an artifact, a television prop, a designer soap box. It was a surrender to show business, a triumph of trivia, a debasement of debate. Never in the history of electoral conflict had so little been said by so ...”

“... Tower of Blue Horses; a Monet of yachts on a river; Duncan Grant’s Dancers, a cornfield by John Nash. The one original was a watercolour by T.A. McCormack dominated by a Chinese fish plate. Over the years all this moved towards something prettier; the first impulse to modernity was not wholly sustained. Happiness was a professional matter because I ...”

“... These biographies of John Gielgud by Jonathan Croall and Sheridan Morley are quite hard to tell apart. They are of much the same size, bear handsome pictures of the actor in old age on the front of their dust-jackets, and are, inevitably, affectionate and indulgent towards their subject. As Dirk Bogarde remarked when Croall consulted him about the work in hand, ‘everybody adored him, so the book might make rather flat reading ...”

“... Greeting’s’. When the bag company refused to replace them staffers at the Town Hall spent hours pasting little pieces of adhesive tape over every offending apostrophe. My contradictory husband, who is sometimes known in his field as Write-it-Wrong Elbow, liberated a few of the apostrophes by pulling off the adhesive tape. 13 January. The ...”

“... houses. At school at the end of term, a hired reel-to-reel projector is humped into the dining hall and we have a treat. The Christian Union students walk out in protest, as they do not approve of what they call ‘the Bioscope’. The students who remain fall silent, and as no one is shouting at them, some take the chance of sleep. Whites of the eye ...”

“... had a comprehensive social life. Tea dances were a regular feature. There was a communal dining hall, but we had our meals on the ward. I used to go down to collect the food trolleys. Moving round the building one got glimpses of the life that went on, this world within a world. There were people ‘working’ – long lines of patients sitting at the ...”

“... instead, he earns what and where he can, in literary hackwork, clerking at the local town hall (having to sex newborn babies when registering their birth) and tutoring. What Vallès wanted was to portray the vie de bohème as he had experienced it himself, hard, undernourished, leading nowhere, not at all like the prettified version of it put about by ...”

“... well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler (d. 1820): ‘Be not dark or mysterious; Affect not absence of mind; Punch no one in conversation; Hold no one by the button; Spit not on the carpet; Dare to be prudish; Avoid mauvaise honte.’ (‘What’s mauvaise honte, Mamma?’ – ‘Oh, ask ...”

“... up from there being so much travel: Last thing, after the doors, the windows and the light in the hall, I come up and for the fear the cat might stifle the baby I put the suitcase across the stairs. We are walled in by dreams of travel ... And the modesty of his enterprise, its accuracy, gives it a reticent charm beside the self-observant adventures of ...”

“... night is evoked with much detail, and walk-on cameos by ascertainably ‘real’ 1990 guests – John Major, Richard Rogers, Neil Kinnock and, of course, the richly despised Howard Jacobson. Francis Jay gives an impromptu television interview in which, with all the authority of one who has studied deconstruction at Sussex, he dismisses the shortlisted ...”

“... with a ‘certification’: this short, thin, black tie had a provenance. It had been worn by John Lennon at a London concert in the 1960s. The letter of ‘certification’, signed by the impresario concerned and by Lennon himself, confirmed the association between tie and wearer. I also have a record of a cheque I wrote on 27 January 1982. This is for ...”

“... and Sacheverell, their ill-suited and erratic parents and their life at the family home, Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, have long since been lodged, along with the Mitfords and some outlying members of the Bloomsbury group, in the national Pantheon of the higher eccentricity. These are people who, it is felt, with some pride, could only be English and about ...”

“... all have been dissolved in metaphor. Embarking on the short journey from all-mod cons Wragby Hall to the ancient forest which contains the gamekeeper’s hut and cottage, Connie gets ready to swap celluloid and radio sets for forget-me-nots woven into pubic hair: signs made in anger for signs made in tenderness. Something similar happens to Bowling in ...”

“... the West End. Of course there were examples of avant-garde plays which didn’t go down well, and John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance was a notorious box-office disaster. But Arnold Wesker’s Roots (which is cited as having disappointing ticket sales in its first run) did capacity business on its revival alongside the other two plays in the ...”

“... the road with the psychologist J.C. Flügel and the philosopher Cyril Joad, and reported back to John O’ London’s Weekly. His Leaves from a Psychist’s Casebook (1933) and Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter (1936) were bestsellers. The BBC frequently broadcast about the supernatural while cultural conservatives also cashed in. In a Britain carved up by ...”