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“... do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the closing pages of Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, whose author-hero is said to be a ‘chapter of accidents’, and in the title and precarious plot of Anthony Powell’s O, How the wheel becomes it! The wheel is Ophelia’s, and suggests the incessant circlings of fortune, but ...”

“... was all set, in its competent and agreeable fashion, to carry on as before. According to Henry James, in 1899, the novel had become a universally valid form, ‘the book par excellence’; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was still indispensable, ‘the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire ...”

“... output as an architect was limited: a house in Bath and work on Lancaster Crown Court and Shire Hall provide the most substantial remaining evidence of his limited practice. The writings he left are, judging by the account Brian Lukacher gives of them in Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England, voluminous but opaque, incoherent and ...”

“... Pandava brothers for their queen, Draupadi. Its wide streets and orchards surrounded a palatial hall, built by the demon-architect Maya, which appeared ‘like a mass of new clouds conspicuous in the sky’. The hall was ‘so rich and well built’ that it rivalled the celestial home of Brahma. Its columns and arches ...”

“... yellow-haired blonde’ who presides over the ticket cage at a Bowery cinema, and the Rev. Mr James Jefferson Davis Hall, ‘the greatest and most frightening street preacher in the city’. There is the founder of Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People, where the exhibits include Theodore ...”

“... of the most ambitious – she would become the office manager – was Eileen Joyce, the sister of James, who had fluent Italian after years spent in Trieste. She went there in 1910, according to her daughter Bozena, ‘in order to cultivate her fine voice’, and lived with James and Nora, and sometimes their brother ...”

“... white witch of the Palais Royal, most earthy of oracles’) and in pieces on Updike, Balzac, Henry James, written with an authority and perception based on lifelong intimacy. He applied the same seriousness with which he encouraged new writers to reviving the careers of older ones – such as Jean Rhys – and restoring writers consigned by accident or ...”

“... be early in the 16th century – it was the custom in good society for a boy to come in to the hall after supper with his face blackened, his forehead bound with white or yellow taffeta, and bells tied to his legs. He then proceeded to dance the Morisco the length of the hall, forth and back, to the great amusement of ...”

“... soup … A knife hangs over the rice ladle.’ The masses say: ‘The communal canteen is a dining hall (a place for getting food), a tribunal (a place where kitchen staff beat and scold people) and a bordello (where team leaders and managers hire the prettiest girls as kitchen staff and mess around with them).’ What he doesn’t mention, surely because it ...”

“... When Charles II died in 1685 without legitimate offspring, the throne passed to his brother James, Duke of York, who had been brought up in exile in France as a Catholic and who now began publicly attending mass. Within a few months the Duke of Monmouth’s abortive rebellion and Baron Jeffreys’s judicial revenge, the Bloody Assizes, spread fear that ...”

“... I’d become a convert at the age of 16 when I attended a rally in London: it was in Central Hall, Westminster, and was led by a man called John Wimber, a big, serious man with a neatly trimmed beard who specialised in what he called the ‘ministry of signs and wonders’. Wimber had been the founder of a Christian community called the Vineyard ...”

“... one imagines an English country house should be, a hotchpotch of different periods: medieval hall, 18th-century courtyards, Gothic front, solid green walls of yew and parterres of box. We film in a gallery adjoining the drawing room, part of the private wing, with photographs of Lord D. at Cambridge, in India as a young man and ADC to Wavell and now ...”

“... Cabinet? Sometime in the spring of 1967, I trudged along to a protest meeting at Oxford Town Hall. The line-up was of the sort summarised by the phrase ‘stage army of the good’. A moon-faced vicar or two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on ...”

“... One of the many contradictory qualities of the British,’ James Lees-Milne rightly notes in his attractive if angry anthology in piam memoriam Bladesover, ‘is to revere, and even lament, the things they are in the process of destroying.’ You cannot, he seems to be saying, have conservation without destruction, or a stay of execution without a sentence ...”

“... and 1997; there will be few spending commitments, and he will deliver that news to a gratified hall which loves nasty medicine; he will deplore a ‘class ceiling’ that holds back talent and rewards iniquity; he will mention the climate crisis and wish he could do more; he will scatter a few surprises, probably on childcare and perhaps on education. He ...”