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“... he appears in this book, look as convincing an architect of his own downfall as the ‘Tumble-down Dick’ on whom we were brought up. He fought back vigorously against his opponents, and, like Charles in 1641, was prepared to turn to support from Scotland and Ireland to keep power against his enemies. The fact that, unlike Charles I, he soon realised that the ...”

“... to get the political editors of the Sun, the Observer, the Times and the Sunday Times sacked. Dick Crossman reported that ‘Harold spent ten minutes at cabinet, complaining about a disc jockey, I think they’re called.’ Wilson did manage to persuade the director-general of the BBC, the normally robust Hugh Carleton Greene, to postpone that week’s ...”

“... in Michael Schmidt’s anthology, for though Peter Scupham, Jeremy Hooker, Jeffrey Wainwright, Dick Davies and John Ash are all highly talented and painstaking artists, they seem to be fashioning their poems for themselves and each other. As Auden and Eliot showed, ‘difficult’ poetry can still be popular, but to secure the ordinary reader’s attention ...”

“... of these two feelings is captured most succinctly in an exchange between the physician Bernard Rieux, the central character who reveals himself at the end of the novel as its narrator, and Father Paneloux, who preaches acquiescence and divine love to packed congregations of the fearful while also joining the fight against the plague (to which he ...”

“... say I can’t come but I look forward to being invited next year when doubtless the guest will be Bernard Manning. Giggleswick doesn’t have many distinguished old boys though one which it never seems to acknowledge was the critic James Agate. This reticence may be on account of Agate’s well-known propensity to drink his own piss. 13 June. Three police ...”

“... and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d written about him, she has tried to read Kafka but without success. For the same reason she ...”

“... manner of Brecht and Weill, ‘There Is a Man’, a late improvisation by Welles and his composer, Bernard Herrmann. The sentimental idea of Kane, which the film undercuts but fails to conjure away, has its source in the incurable wish of spectators that a man who enjoys so natural a sway over others should also be a man who uses his gifts well. The plot and ...”

“... richest man in Russia, one of the richest in the world. A week before he had had a meeting with Dick Cheney. That this kind of access, and prominence, can’t guarantee you immunity is hard to believe. Perhaps he really couldn’t believe it until a group of special forces, in ski masks and armed to the teeth, stormed his plane on the tarmac of a Siberian ...”

“... also the cinematographer on Just for Fun (1963), whose cast comprises, inter alia, Jimmy Savile, Dick Emery, Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, and Kenny Lynch. Yet just five years later Roeg would be co-directing the cut-up saturnalia of Performance: a ripely ambisexual Mick Jagger; hints of queer S&M; a breakfast of hallucinogenic mushrooms; 99 swirls of ...”

“... seem at times desperate, melancholy, unsatisfactory, incomplete, a piece of juvenilia. The critic Bernard Benstock, for one, feels that it displays ‘a serious lack of commitment in any direction’ on the author’s part and what he called, without it seems any irony, ‘an irony without a centre of gravity’. The story of At Swim-Two-Birds is simple. An ...”

“... words), compounding the offence by originally naming the character Claire, a true dick move. Criticised, Roth reverted to his customary fiction-shouldn’t-be-construed-as-autobiography defence, which had long worn threadbare. Deception should have been the conclusive sign that these two weren’t suited to grow old together, but they went and ...”

“... ultimatum for the assault on Iraq. Barroso is in good company. France now has a foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had no time for even the modest duplicities of his country about America’s war, welcoming it as another example of the droit d’ingérence he had always championed. Sweden, where once a prime minister could take a sharper distance from ...”