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“... grandfather, an enterprising builder, came to Prague from the Moravian town where Havel’s friend Tom Stoppard was born; his father, a civil engineer turned architect and speculative builder, got into debt by putting up one of Prague’s prettiest residential suburbs above the River Vitava, and even after the Communist takeover he was popular enough with ...”

“... Leafing through it I find a quotation I have often cited as it rang bells with me (and, indeed, Tom Stoppard). As I had remembered, it went: ‘All the books he had ever written filled him only with a complex feeling of repentance.’ Looking at the salvaged book today I find it reads: ‘All the books he had published merely moved him to a complex ...”

“... Feldene I had to be put on the acid-suppressant pills that I’ve been on ever since. 14 January. Tom Stoppard rings my agent Rosalind Chatto to tell her that when in last year’s LRB diary I quote an old lady in New York as saying ‘I zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who ...”

“... romances, but in the 20th century the more intellectual Hamlet was identified as the central text. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead enacts a bleaker Shakespearean inheritance. No touch of immortality or hope of salvation for these helpless courtiers. This is a drama preoccupied with its own fixed conclusion: ‘In our ...”

“... store, and the sadness of that, because this is the space that changed all our lives. His father, Tom Funge, like my uncle and grandfather, had been involved in the struggle for Irish independence, so when Paul founded his Art Centre in Gorey in 1970 or 1971, it was easy for me, aged 15 or 16, to get permission to hitchhike the twenty miles to see it. I ...”

“... All That Fall came into being; and drama thrived – the careers of N.F. Simpson, Pinter and Stoppard were nurtured there. Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote in the New Statesman that ‘the whole musical landscape’ was ‘likely to be transformed by the arrival of the Third Programme’; Edward Sackville-West in Picture Post thought that it could ‘well ...”

“... drama, whether in the form of Classical ‘translation’ (Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act and Seize the Fire, Craig Raine’s ‘1953’), or, pre-empting Muldoon, the opera libretto all in verse that is Raine’s The Electrification of the Soviet Union – a Pasternak adaptation set to music by Nigel Osborne. There is a ...”

“... In Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, Dorothy Moore – a retired music-hall chanteuse and the wife of a moral philosopher called George Moore – is going dotty in her bedroom. The precipitating cause is a televised fight between the first two astronauts to land on the Moon about who gets to go back home on a damaged lunar ascent module that can carry only one ...”