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“... of Sainty’s sissiness. The great moment for Sainty comes early on, when the boys are out riding with their tutor, and he is goaded into jumping a ditch which Arthur has already cleared with ease. Sainty panics, his horse bolts, he faints and falls and breaks his hip. When the great surgeon (‘Sir John’) who tends him reluctantly confirms that he ...”

“... drama of English local government’, Winifred Holtby did pretty well with her bestseller South Riding in 1936. The prologue depicts a novice reporter in the press gallery: ‘His heart beat and his eyes dilated. Here, he told himself, was the source of reputations, of sanitaria, bridges, feuds, scandals, of remedies for broken ambitions or foot-and-mouth ...”

“... title, its brass-rubbings and its frequent dippings into the nitty-gritty of Christian rites, Alan Bray’s last book, The Friend, might not seem terribly exciting at first glance. And yet it is written in part as a defence of John Boswell’s Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which came out a decade ago, and in part as sequel to ...”

“... with no questions as to who the shareholders are and where based, certainly not in the North Riding and probably not even in the country. No wonder Corbyn is ahead of the rest.1 September. Oliver Sacks dies, my first memory of whom was as an undergraduate in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from ...”

“... even had an allotment, but in his childhood he had spent holidays on a farm at Bielby in the East Riding, which he always talked of as a lost paradise. The village they were moving to was very pretty, too pretty for Mam in her depressed mood: ‘You’ll see,’ she said, ‘we’ll be inundated with folks visiting.’ The cottage faced onto the village ...”

“... long as they were scribbled and sent.’ This, though satire is nowhere in question, reads like an Alan Bennett take-off – language and sentiments cut to the measure of the breezy Jean herself. One more, related, example: Blythe is talking about last letters from those killed in war. One of the lessons of war is how to say goodbye, though few attempted to ...”

“... rich again and (according to these not easily embarrassed authors) ‘retained the common touch, riding in a Rolls to buy his fish and chips’. By the outbreak of the Second World War, when James Hanson was 17, the old firm was making lots of money selling horses to the Army. At the end of the war, the Hansons, still staunch standard-bearers for free ...”

“... while his courtiers stood for hours at a time, dropping with boredom: but outside the court, often riding unattended, the King would stop and chat with farm labourers, road-menders and anybody he came across. When they went to Cheltenham he promised the Queen, with a lack of formality that not so long ago was thought to be a modern breakthrough, that they ...”

“... in Vienna throughout the war. With both philosophers holding forth to their respective circles and riding roughshod over any opposition I long for some bold student to stand up and say that this way of teaching philosophy defeats its own purpose and isn’t worth the bruised feelings and human diminishment arguing with Wittgenstein or Popper seems to have ...”

“... the Dissolution of the Monasteries presented as if it were some Viking raid, with troops riding down the fleeing monks, hacking them to death as they try to rescue the monastic treasures. It’s a far cry from the peaceful retirement on a small pension that was the lot of most of the monks and nuns, with the actual dismantling of the fabric and the ...”

“... thing out of the age of Sputnik’: When he was drunk and driving it, he imagined he was riding a hydrogen bomb to Los Angeles. But when Peden was sober, he was apt to wonder if there was a god, or not simply a divine wind of oratory investing man, and this divine wind was blind and deaf and cared not in whom or at what time it manifested ...”

“... The question of lying down – how often, and with whom – is as interesting a question in Alan Strachan’s "biography of Redgrave as it is in Gielgud’s letters, yet, if anything, the Actor’s Dilemma, grandiosely experienced, is more brilliantly conjured with in Strachan’s book than by any one of Gielgud’s describers, including Gielgud ...”

“... to be to enforce the regulations against cycling in the Park. Ten years ago A. was fined £25 for riding her bike to the tennis courts at 7.30 in the morning, a piece of officiousness that could only happen in England. I have always thought that if the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Edinburgh meant what they say about the environment they’d long ago have ...”

“... of war. The comic potential of Auden’s rackety life has famously been drawn on in these pages in Alan Bennett’s ‘The Wrong Blond’, a review of Dorothy Farnan’s memoir Auden in Love; Davenport-Hines, I told myself, might well be less indulgent. As it happens, I was dead wrong: Auden is a work of impassioned praise, less a biography than a literary ...”

“... than the UK’s subsidy to Scotland? The voters are alienated from Labour, and the SNP has been riding high in the opinion polls, creating the possibility that it might become the largest party at Holyrood after the election. If this happens, it is long-standing SNP policy that there would be a referendum on independence. The third element of this historic ...”