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“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”

“... has been unlike Fassbinder’s in almost every respect. He was born into a working-class family in Wiltshire in 1959 and began writing for the NME as a teenager in the late 1970s. In the decades since he has published just two books: Vital Signs, a career-spanning but skimpy anthology from 1998, and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, a recent collection of ...”

“... established, rotating between the splendid mansions at their disposal: favourites were Clouds in Wiltshire, Stanway in Gloucestershire, Taplow in Bucks. Together they developed a culture and ethos that Laura would have approved: beauty-loving, inquisitive and faintly mystical; thrilling to art and poetry; critical of social strictures and committed to an ...”

“... of communities. It is at this point that Clough’s great village works develop – at Oare in Wiltshire, Cushendun and Bushmills in County Antrim, Portmeirion and, perhaps the best of them, Cornwell in Oxfordshire – as well as the lesser ‘tightening-ups’, pulling a village or suburb together around some central feature, as with his restoration of ...”

“... disastrous. Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case ...”

“... party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer said. ‘Yeah, you should do.’ ‘I could set that ...”

“... are beginning to swallow up all the agricultural land between the city centre and the villages John Clare knew. Peterborough has already accepted, at a price, the forcibly migrated rough sleepers of Cambridge. Its reward is public housing gifted by remote Kensington developers.When​ I reached the Thames, coming away from Abbey Wood station, I was ...”

“... crow’s nest of history and I can see what’s hurtling towards them.My father’s house​ in Wiltshire backed onto the Kennet and Avon canal, which used to connect Bath and Reading, but fell into disuse after the arrival of the Great Western Railway in 1841. When we walked along the towpath in the 1970s, it was neglected and overgrown, perfect conditions ...”

“... like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.3 (And, in ...”

“... NHS the £61 million our farmers take every week.’ In The Lost Village, about life in Pitton in Wiltshire in the 1920s and 1930s, Ralph Whitlock describes the effect on British farming in 1875 of the sudden arrival of ships carrying cheap grain and frozen meat from Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Prices collapsed, and the seemingly ...”

“... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...”