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“... At a Harvard College full of incipient talent – his classmates included Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and Donald Hall – Creeley felt discouraged and alone. ‘My eager thirst for knowledge, almost Jude-the-Obscurian in its innocence, was all but shut down by the sardonic stance of my elders,’ he ...”

“... came crossly down to find that she was right, only in those days the birds were peacocks from the Hall. Today the pheasants don’t hang about, two of them skidding down the sloping roof of the hut like ski jumpers and launching themselves into space before stepping fastidiously round the garden expecting to be fed. 16 July. A book review in the LRB by ...”

“... SIB board to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Gordon Brown as genial and forthright in his way as Kenneth Clarke had been last year in his. First sight of lightly-bearded Alistair Darling, who strikes me as if chosen from a thousand aspirants to be cast as Iago at Covent Garden: is it, I wonder, an advantage in political life to look quite so operatically ...”

“... Kenneth Branagh​ ’s Belfast is set in the early months of the Troubles, in a mixed working-class district that is cleared of its Catholic residents by a loyalist mob. Paving stones are lifted to barricade the end of the street. Neighbourhood vigilantes are replaced by paramilitaries and the British army. Though the representation of events is spare and often stylised, the film catches the impact of the crisis not just on smashed and burned terraced houses but on the fabric of everyday decency ...”

“... what he has accomplished. 24 February. To a Faber meeting for their sales reps at the Butchers’ Hall, which is just by the back door of Barts, bombed presumably and rebuilt in undistinguished neo-Georgian some time in the 1960s. Doorman sullen and no advertisement for the supposed cheerfulness of the butchering profession. Early so have a chance to look at ...”

“... The few who didn’t – the usual crew of Betjeman, Waugh, Lancaster, a Mitford or two and even Kenneth Clark – were regarded as frivolous self-advertisers playing at perversity. What had been a far from straightforward face-off between propagandists for diverse forms of classicism and, on the other side, god’s own warrior-goths, was exhumed as a ...”

“... in Leicester, Manchester and Birmingham. One of the brothers stands prominently at the back of the hall holding a mobile phone. It rings very loudly and the speaker breaks off. The man with the phone walks up and down talking intently in Arabic. Then he shakes his head. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘so much for the great tradition of freedom of speech in this ...”

“... surrender of the Golden Age Murder Mystery: Agatha Christie force-fed on Pevsner and the humbug of Kenneth Baker’s latest flag-waving anthology. A sub-genre that has always been profoundly conservative (hence its popularity, up there with P.G. Wodehouse, in America) is reduced to editorialised sound-bites from a phantom Smith Square manifesto. Two coppers ...”

“... Many of its activities were moved out of London in 1939, the bulk of them to Wood Norton Hall near Evesham. Soon, around a thousand items a week were being produced from the depths of rural Worcestershire, though announcers continued to say ‘This is London calling’ (clearly, ‘This is Wood Norton calling’ just wouldn’t cut it). Even in this ...”

“... called Luther from a pay phone. They picked him up at a petrol station and went to another beer hall, where Vickers stayed behind. Back on the road, Luther told Martin to stop the car, and they got out. Luther had a ketchup bottle full of salt. He stuck it in Martin’s back and told him it was a gun. Martin was not convinced, so Luther knocked him over the ...”

“... are the parameters.’She was a great woman, her performance of ‘Let’s Do It’ at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in Lancaster at the avocado counter. Her Dinnerladies was often sentimental, but she caught in the part of the handyman, played by ...”

“... searched Australia for a town called Carnegie so that he could stand in front of its town hall with his body obliterating the word TOWN and be photographed for the cover of his album BARRY HUMPHRIES AT CARNEGIEHALL. Nowadays Edna satisfies that urge on his behalf. She punishes Australia for its vulgarity by personifying it for a startled world, and ...”

“... remark on his resemblance to Mr Spock or someone from outer space. Actually he looks like Kenneth Williams in one of those roles (Chauvelin, for instance) when the eyes suddenly go back and he goes wildly over the top. The smirking crew around Redwood are deeply depressing, Tony Marlow and Edward Leigh both fat and complacent and looking like two ...”

“... an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess’s octogenarian narrator, Kenneth Toomey. Terrence Rattigan was surprised to find during war service that he was brave in an ordinary way. Out of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T.E. Lawrence (Ross) and Alexander the Great (Adventure Story). But ...”

“... appears as static as a Monet locomotive idling at the Gare St Lazare. He also left out the hare. Kenneth Clark described Rain, Steam and Speed as the ‘most extraordinary’ of Turner’s paintings. ‘I suppose that everybody today would accept it as one of the cardinal pictures of the 19th century on account of its subject as well as its ...”