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“... canvas, and it is not even certain that his lines portraying it, which were first printed under James I, had been written by 1601 (though it has suited some critics to assert, without evidence, that they were ‘censored’). The Government prosecutors, admittedly, had good reason to emphasise the enactment of Richard’s overthrow, which they took as ...”

“... on the various ways in which Cather – in Acocella’s view the only American novelist besides James to rival Tolstoy and Flaubert for beauty of style and moral depth – had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics. The story Acocella told was one of noble articulation – Cather’s poised, pared-down imaginative utterance – overwhelmed by ...”

“... till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... slowly become clear. The revelations of the Grenfell inquiry, so plainly and painfully recorded by Peter Apps of Inside Housing, are echoed not just in thousands of other cases of ghastly what-might-have-beens but in the lackadaisical, flailing process of undoing what was done.* The inquiry revealed a tangle of deniability masquerading as responsibility, with ...”

“... for a media award these days: undermining of elected authority.’ His second pet hate is Peter Hennessy – one of the very few journalists to explore and expose the inner recesses of the Civil Service. Sir Bernard hates Brian Redhead of the Today programme, which he regards as subversive, hates Mark Lawson of the Independent, whom he describes as a ...”

“... Zealand’s “best” writers grouped around Katherine Mansfield, Allen Curnow, Frank Sargeson, James K. Baxter and Janet Frame’. Serious fiction and poetry have been ‘privileged’ over other genres, which have been ‘marginalised’. All this needs correction, ‘Even the notion of “literature” itself,’ he continues, ‘must come under ...”

“... but ended up running a tiny, undemanding parish in the City, overshadowed by St Paul’s. Robert Peter, a brilliant Classics scholar at Cambridge, ‘achieved so little because he was a fool’; moreover, he was cruel to choirboys and horses. Henry Carrington, a dilettante, failed to take on the Dissenters, resorted to wintering in Italy, leaving curates ...”

“... into close relations with Hugh Gaitskell. It would be unkind as well as inaccurate to call him the Peter Mandelson of the Gaitskell years, not least because, unlike Mandelson, he had established constituency roots before he began and also because, unlike Mandelson, he had rather little impact on the actual presentation of the Party’s policies, which remained ...”

“... Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons would necessarily reveal the more admirable qualities of those Englishmen who ...”

“... of a major new artist’, but the Observer sees nothing but ‘duff bravura and blank poise’. Peter Fuller, editor of Modern Painters, fears for the hyped Conroy. The Times Literary Supplement: a ‘sinister portent’. The Financial Times critic describes the paintings with care, but fetches up with ‘a scumbled emptiness’. The Tablet concedes ‘a ...”

“... why, for example, are we not told on the first page of the first essay that it is a review of James Watson’s book, The Double Helix, and was published in 1968? A lot of things have changed since then, and the reader needs to know, before reaching page 258, that the essay on page 3 is something of a period-piece. It would have been nice if Professor ...”

“... were affectionate but equivocal. They had been close friends at Cambridge, along with Hallam and James Spedding, and FitzGerald had hero-worshipped Tennyson and his verse. Tennyson called him ‘old Fitz’, patronised him, and accepted from him quite large sums of money, being subsidised at one point to the tune of three hundred a year, a large figure in ...”

“... Upholsterer was produced in 1758, Alzuma in 1773. And while we are on the drama, let us remember James Robinson Planché, born in Piccadilly, London on 27 February 1796, who is part of the Romantic Period and inventor of the Christmas pantomime. The list of his plays runs to over 150 items, and his entry to seven pages. (Shakespeare gets five and a ...”

“... about Eliot’), Bernard van Dieren is a ‘dim thing with the grey face in napless velvet’, Peter Warlock roars obscenities, Maynard Keynes (‘trying to turn himself into a heterosexual with a ballet dancer’) leers at Toomey, James Agate (‘a well-known sodomite’) makes a pass at the dreadful Heinz ... One is ...”

“... or experimental verse, as opposed to more traditional or mainstream poets such as Robert Lowell, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur – the sorts likely to be published in the New Yorker and awarded Pulitzers. In those days, you were on one side or the other. Creeley was defiantly on The New American Poetry side, and his work figures prominently in that hugely ...”