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“... Guards in the Great War. He was shaken and humbled, as the British Empire was to be. When his son John, aged barely 17, was rejected by the Navy because of poor eyesight, he wanted to go off and enlist in the ranks, but his father used his friendship with Lord Roberts to get him a commission in the Irish Guards. He ...”

“... of our school lives includes commissioning ‘the distinguished historian and biographer Andrew Roberts … to chair a panel of academics who will draw up a simple but clear list of key facts, personalities and dates which every child should be taught’. I wonder, disingenuously perhaps, if one of those ‘key personalities’ will be William Hone. He ...”

“... looked – or look, to some of us – like our last bow. According to an article quoted in Adam Roberts’s book It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (Elliott & Thompson, £14.99), 41 per cent of Americans and 58 per cent of white evangelical Christians believe Jesus will return before 2050, while 83 per cent of Muslims in ...”

“... I’m really against nudity in movies,’ Julia Roberts said a while ago. ‘When you act with your clothes on, it’s a performance. When you act with your clothes off, it’s a documentary. I don’t do documentaries.’ Quoting this bit of wit and wisdom in a recent New Yorker piece on Roberts, Anthony Lane wrote: ‘it shows … how remote she is from any European visions of cinema – not just from the relaxed, Old World attitude toward sex but from the European assumption (found lingering in the work of Americans like Robert Altman) that the scent of documentary can and should be allowed to flavour a fictional method ...”

“... led her to put such effort into paring herself down to the bone – as in the line from a poem by John Hewitt: ‘A tree is truer for its being bare.’ However, when it comes to her ‘recalling’ a rape by a motorcycle gang, even Josie concedes that it may have all been in her head: ‘A common fantasy among young women, so I’m told.’ What did happen ...”

“... paper notes – so-called ‘Bradburys’ (the name of the Treasury official who signed them was John Bradbury) – to get more money into circulation. Now that war had been declared it was even less likely that the City’s banks would receive payment for prewar bills of exchange, so the Bank of England offered to take £120 million of unmarketable assets ...”

“... of Cape Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style ...”

“... in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But ...”

“... title, but in another two years the old devil will be 70 and perhaps he is beginning to mellow. John McDermott remarks in his appealing study of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures. In The folks that live on the hill the hero-as-shit has given ...”

“... handsome, unlike the California-lite architecture of the depressing mall that surrounds it. The Roberts Report of 1959 and the subsequent Library and Museums Act promised ‘an efficient and comprehensive’ service to every British citizen. Colchester’s new public library rose to the challenge magnificently (i.e. better than Chelmsford ...”

“... support to most of the claims being made for ‘narrative poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he ...”

“... and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to admire Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had been inspired by Frank Capra’s 1948 State of the Union and, as the son of a sometime Hollywood mogul, Kennedy was groomed for ...”

“... Shrew was about. My co-star in the Shakespeare and who played Beecham in The Chiltern Hundreds was John Scaife, a friend whom I lost sight of after university and only this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and ...”

“... several of the most important members of the reigning Whig Junto – the Duke of Shrewsbury, Sir John Somers, Lord-Keeper of the Great Seal and soon to be Lord High Chancellor, Lord Romney, Sir Edward Russell the First Lord of the Admiralty, and some others – to join him in a scheme by which Kidd was to be sent after the pirates in a vessel provided by the ...”

“... in how to write about crime need look no further than Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor took eight years to research and write their analysis of the most far-reaching corruption trial of this century. The opening summary is startling. Of those prosecuted in connection with Poulson ...”