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“... In Oxford, his early poems were noticed. William Wootten, in The Alvarez Generation (2015), quotes Edward Lucie-Smith: ‘We Oxford poets had an inferiority complex about our Cambridge contemporaries. The chief cause was Thom Gunn. Though his first collection, Fighting Terms, did not appear until 1954, the poems Gunn was publishing in magazines were already ...”

“... invalid dressed in a black dress with a white ruff. It was painted – from memory – by Alfred Edward Chalon, RA (1781-1860), and when it came into the College’s possession, it was said to be ‘very little like’ her. Chalon was widely patronised by the aristocracy, and later received the title of ‘Portrait-painter in water-colours to Her ...”

“... fate. The centralisation is one of the principal things that attracts freebooting tycoons like Sir James Dyson and Sir Jim Ratcliffe, along with the press barons, to the Brexit cause. As Rupert Murdoch, always more candid than his fellows, once remarked, the trouble with the EU was that you never knew who to call.All of Oborne’s books have been published in ...”

“... and stagnant canals was left far behind for Help!, which transplanted the Beatles into a witless James Bond parody that had little to do with anything in their lives. David Melbye, in his contribution to The Beatles in Context, argues persuasively that we too often have a ‘tendency to see before we listen’, and that ‘what impelled (and impels) the ...”

“... to Lebanon’s Christian heartland in 1991, with the approval of Kissinger’s successor, James Baker – a quid pro quo for Syrian participation in the American war to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. When I reminded an American diplomat in Damascus that the US had given a double benediction to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, he said: ‘That ...”

“... Jane Welsh Carlyle, Froude’s posthumous My Relations with Carlyle, and Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne’s The Nemesis of Froude. Everyone has long since taken sides, if not with the tactless first biographer or with the vindictive and family-proud nephew then with Thomas Carlyle or with Jane, or perhaps with Carlyle with reservations, or ...”

“... years. Towards the end of his chapter on Cambridge, summer vacations spent in Paris, working with James Klugmann for a front organisation of the Comintern, and the future historian Margot Heinemann are casually mentioned. Of the former, Hobsbawm delphically remarks, ‘What did one know about him? He gave nothing away’; of the latter, he says simply, ‘she ...”

“... Follain’s essay on Cahun and Moore’s Resistance work.) The V&A’s photographic manager, James Stevenson, is illuminating on the subject of Cahun and Moore’s startlingly unprofessional approach to picture-making. It’s a shock to read that they produced virtually all their work – at least 500 photographs between 1910 and the 1950s – using the ...”

“... in Rothschilds before rising through the ranks of the Gaullist administration. A year later, Edward Heath succeeded Wilson, heading a Conservative government in a time of decolonisation. Unlike any other British prime minister of the postwar epoch, Heath was overwhelmingly oriented to Europe, where he had fought during the Second World War, rather than ...”

“... Land’. Nearly forty years later anti-Union resentment was strong enough to carry Charles Edward Stuart close to an overthrow not just of the Treaty but of the Hanoverian state. Only after the 1745 rebellion did conditions improve enough to resemble the changes promised an earlier generation. This time-lapse is another feature which places the British ...”

“... but was grounded in his hard upbringing in the Bogside. He put Derry into Derrida and worked with Edward Said. That Ireland was a colonial, and postcolonial, country became a given of Field Day, the theatre company and cultural powerhouse driven by his directorship. Whether his focus was on the 6, the 26 or the 32 counties, Deane was never an ...”

“... Buckingham, whom he met in 1930 at J.R. Ackerley’s Hammersmith flat. He notes without dissent Edward Carpenter’s explanation of ‘why I like the Lower Classes. They are not self conscious. I am and therefore need them.’ When things get going with Bob, Forster is able to write: ‘I am happier now than ever in my life, and hope that if anyone reads ...”

“... and green of the hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the ...”

“... concealed beneath the name of a “great man”?’ (She refers to the Shakespearean contender, Edward de Vere, as ‘the Count of Oxford’ – someone who truly never was.) Peter Gay​ and others saw Freud’s early bafflement as instilling heroic habits of curiosity. Whitebook places more stress on the trauma rather than the Oedipal conundrum, and on ...”

“... I would have liked to have gone to Columbia, to study comparative literature with Edward Said, but I had no way to make that happen. So I signed on, read books, went home to help my disconsolate mother, then discovered that the same now unimaginable fiscal laxity that allowed me to claim Supplementary Benefit, as it was then called, also ...”