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“... the Yugoslav resistance to Hitler, and Tito’s sudden excommunication seemed inexplicable. James Klugmann, who had served in Yugoslavia during the war, and came back talking enthusiastically of everything there, was – very tactlessly – commissioned by the Party to write a book explaining the volte-face. He could only make the shuffling best of a ...”

“... knowing, cute, ‘in’, as Miss Didion claimed. What is objectionable about Manhattan, and Annie Hall, is that Woody Allen is publicly analysing a past love affair, with his past lover, on screen (Woody Allen used to be with Diane Keaton, as is well-known; as is also well-known, Diane is now with Warren Beatty, or was at the time of writing). Such ...”

“... of words and things and half-grasped insights – soon after, I had the same experience with Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, chosen because of the Degas on the cover – seems to me the pattern of most readerly initiations. We aren’t drawn in by the argument, or what’s said or shown. Rather something feels right, smells right, in the colour and flavour ...”

“... in his youthful pomp, in Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale. Hawtrey (pre-booze) with Will Hay. James Fox’s strangulated Elephant and Castle in Performance. Hitchcock’s expressionist version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Seabrook’s work, before the wonderful accident of All the Devils Are Here, went straight into the ether. His early essays, as Ginsberg ...”

“... convey another aspect of Larkin the man, but from those quoted, a less interesting one.) And now James Booth, who teaches English at Hull, and has already written two books on the poet (Philip Larkin: Writer, 1992, and Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight, 2005), has composed a brief for the defence of Larkin the man (whom he knew slightly at the ...”

“... respect rather than disposable celebrity. She has contributed to some of the better documentaries: James Ellroy, Anita Ekberg, Eric Sykes, watershed BBC2, air-hostesses and desert roads, midnight fodder on Channel 4, the real lost memories. She likes to use old film, degraded archive footage, and to have it reshot on tape, fed into her slim box of ...”

“... from the family coat of arms – was the product of a landed Cheshire family whose estate, Eaton Hall south of Liverpool, dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary honour was a baronetcy conferred by James I in 1622, largely to raise revenue; the first baronet must have been a disappointment in that ...”

“... Ghosts keeps up the old Modernist ways. ‘Here they are. There are seven of them. Or better say, hall a dozen or so, that gives more leeway.’ Thus the opening of Ghosts. It could be the first paragraph of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. Better for whom, one wonders? And leeway for what, exactly? Why, for more such calculated inexactness. ‘Tell them ...”

“... or seven operas flourished in the theatre – nothing could have kept them down; so in the concert hall did the Requiem. All that is utterly changed. Verdi’s 26 operas (28 if you count revisions under new titles) have all been performed; few, perhaps two or three at most, seem unlikely to hold the stage. Julian Budden’s three-volume study is only the chief ...”

“... portrait now flanks John’s in the College’s Council Room, advised his students in the anatomy hall that, in order to ‘avoid giving offence to the populace’, they should ‘out of doors, speak with caution of what may be passing here’. To ‘the populace’, their researches seemed fearful, particularly because of their hunger for recently dead ...”

“... the credulity of Salem. Influential manuals of witchhunters like the Malleus Maleficarum and James VI’s Demonologie warn repeatedly that the devil can remain unseen, take possession of one of his votaries and, through this instrument of his will, cause prodigies as well as mayhem. Theories to explain the Salem witchhunt have followed fast and furious ...”

“... for as long as he had been alive, according to the nightly news shows. (His partner, 23-year-old James McDonald, died from wounds received in the same incident.) You felt that the statistic might have given pause to the TV bulletins, transmitting what appeared at first, to jet-lagged eyes, to be file footage of freeway snafu: a cortege of squad cars and ...”

“... is real’ – his sole invention being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s ...”

“... to the temptations of the flesh than some of his real-life counterparts: ‘I head across the hall into my bedroom, where Deborah Lane is already opening her bag of goodies.’ She says good morning, he takes off his shirt. And then – surprise! misdirection! – ‘she puts her stethoscope on my bare chest.’ One ticking time bomb just isn’t enough ...”

“... than his father’s because of its connections with royalty (she was remotely descended from King James I of Scotland); at school, he boasted so much about the (alleged) venerability of his title that he was facetiously nicknamed ‘the Old English Baron’. Occasionally the pretension turned more prickly: invited to join a formal procession, he sulked for ...”