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“... centrality in British culture. Characteristically feeble echoes of this assault were evident in John Major’s recent sneering at ‘progressive theorists’, but some years ago the real emotional dynamic was laid bare, indecently bare, by (as usual) Norman Tebbit, who extolled ‘the man in the pub’ against the upper-class ‘cocktail set’ on the ...”

“... activity on the London literary scene that month, for at an institution in Lincoln’s Inn Fields John Thelwall was lecturing to a much less respectable audience on Shakespeare and Dr Johnson. It has become an orthodoxy of literary history that there was a phenomenon called ‘Romantic Shakespearean criticism’, that it was a way of reading which especially ...”

“... John Betjeman was the voice of postwar Englishness: at best, humorous, quirky and enthusiastic about some of the oddest things; at worst, parochial and smug shading into bitter. How ironic, in view of later developments and the argument of Timothy Mowl’s book, that Nikolaus Pevsner’s first visit to England, in 1930, was to research a new topic: Englishness in art ...”

“... they used to be’ section): ‘That an increasing number of young men from Eton and the other major public schools should have done things like photography, interior decoration, or art-dealing in preference to the traditional service careers was to a certain extent the result of Britain’s withdrawal from India and other dependencies overseas ...”

“... demise cost him not only a substantial amount in death duties but also any further hope of major ministerial advancement. The road had stopped short for the Wigan peer. ‘Bal’, as he was known to friends who knew better than to confuse him with Albert Ballin, compiled 54 ornately-bound volumes of diaries, which his son eventually entrusted to ...”

“... Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, after appalling suffering during the past forty years, are the major recruiting ground for international terrorism,’ and ‘Dr Henry Kissinger and many other experts have been right to point out in recent days that in the list of governments supporting international terrorism, Gaddafi comes pretty low down.’ If he ...”

“... Long ago, with his first collection, In a Green Night (1962), he stated his aims in the poem ‘As John to Patmos’, and again in ‘Islands’: O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear What I swear now, as John did: To praise lovelong, the living and the brown ...”

“... to blow up things and make bombs and kill people, they can still do that. That happens in most major cities in the world, most countries in the world, that people get killed and there’s violence.’ I heard that, along with banning photographs of the caskets of American soldiers, the administration was actively preventing photographs being taken of the ...”

“... encounter with the Demoiselles because the painting figures so prominently in the second volume of John Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso, whose first chapter, and part of the second, are devoted to its genesis, sources, formal innovations and iconography, and the ways in which Picasso’s experiences at the time he was painting it affected its final ...”

“... The red coat, or perhaps it’s a dressing-gown, is what he is wearing in the 1881 portrait by John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. It is a swashbuckling, very theatrical portrait, one that would make anyone curious about its subject. Almost any other sitter would be devoured by that bright red coat, floor-length with a giant collar, but Dr Pozzi easily ...”

“... and especially the superb Tempest sequel or commentary, The Sea and the Mirror, testify to a major poet at the height of his powers. A model of professional industry, he was also in these years writing a good deal of prose.Presumably he agreed to do this heavy lecture course for the same reason he wrote prose – because he needed the money – but they ...”

“... enough of a rarity on campus to be referred to as ‘the lady professor’; and when she joined a major law firm in Little Rock in 1977, it was as its first female attorney. By the time she became a partner, women still made up less than 10 per cent of practising lawyers in the States. Her subsequent firsts were far more public. She was the first wife of an ...”

“... In 1598 John Florio called his dictionary A World of Words, and the joy of a new dictionary is the traveller’s joy, the joy of entering a new world, or at least a new state in some loose federal union, recognisably part of the same nation, but with its own eccentricities and prejudices, more rigid or more lax in licensing laws or taboos, more or less committed to conservation ...”

“... Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid. An hour later, as I’m leaving, the following conversation takes place: Reid: Halloo. Me: Glad you jumped ship in time? Reid: I left after Blair resigned. Last three years and Broon a total disaster. Me: I agree. But you think Blair would have ...”

“... and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from ...”