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“... I can. It’s not my sort of book at all, but it leaves me wanting to read his other books. Zadie Smith thinks it a masterpiece and says so on the cover. Certainly it’s a new way of writing a novel.25 May, Yorkshire. To Leeds this morning in an empty train with neither of us feeling very clever but revived by a lovely lunch at Sous le Nez in Leeds, mine ...”

“... it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had owned: it ...”

“... there was ‘no clear demarcation between “revolutionary” and “reformist”’, as Joan Smith points out in The ILP on Clydeside, 1893-1932, and, in Glasgow at least, the ILP and BSP ‘shared similar policies and held joint demonstrations’ and were involved in both political and industrial activism (nationally, the SDF/BSP was much less ...”

“... Links remain, however. The junior officers of 1990 run the army of 2022. General Mark Carleton-Smith, the current chief of the general staff, passed out of Sandhurst in 1986. Sales’s assessment is revealing of a culture that requires rigidity in order to function amid the terror, fatigue and confusion of war, but as a consequence often ignores criticism ...”

“... well and was more than reciprocally rewarded three times, in You Can’t Take It with You, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Ford called on him for a pair of late films. In Two Rode Together, Stewart and his co-star, Richard Widmark, are lost to their better qualities, lazy, loud-voiced, working from an undernourished script, with ...”

“... would be reached in much the same time as the present two and a quarter hours). At the time, Andrew Adonis was the number two transport minister. A long-time devotee of the railways, having joined the Cotswold Line Promotion Group as a teenager in the 1980s, he began pushing for Labour to support a new north-south line. Geoff Hoon, the transport ...”

“... voters baulked and the Tories won comfortably with a lead of over 7 per cent. But the minute Smith succeeded Kinnock, Labour shot into a lead which was consolidated beyond recovery by the effect of the forced exit from the ERM in September 1992. The Government had endlessly told the electorate that leaving the ERM would be a disaster and had even raised ...”

“... just such a reaction chain. When the host, the comedian Chris Rock, made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, her husband, Will Smith, strode up on stage and slapped Rock in the face on live television. For several days afterwards, countless commentators, celebrities and social media users sought to distinguish ...”

“... exclude technology, Patriotism Appeal and the royal sod. They have on the whole excluded Kipling. Andrew Rutherford’s 1971 Penguin selection tried to smuggle him in by putting the emphasis on the later, more psychologically and artistically complex stories. But as Angus Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed out in his 1977 biography, this ...”

“... turn someone smiling, loving almost.23 March. Asked by the Guardian if I would like to interview Andrew McMillan, the poet. Though I’m an admirer I say no, only because if I did it would be as much about myself as about McMillan and how his life has been very different from mine.24 March. Rupert asks me about Worship Street, where I lodged in the early ...”

“... to repudiate the past and make a new start.’ Of course, that doesn’t always come as good news. Andrew Sanders’s brisk and engaging dash through the reactions of Dickens, Carlyle, Thackeray, Macaulay, and heaven help us, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, shows just how rapidly British middle-of-the-road opinion could slide into Podsnappian condemnation of ...”

“... at others it was V. Nabokov, Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, Véra Nabokov and for special occasions, J.G. Smith. Those in the know addressed themselves to the complete set: ‘Dear V and V’. Véra’s individuality was most publicly evident in her Jewishness. Unlike her husband, she was a double exile: a refugee from the Bolsheviks and from Russian ...”

“... and less astringent productions like A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), plus memories of Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie, gave rise to a late-life idea of her as a treasurably naughty grande dame, all genteel camp and classily to-the-point prose. Others, however, saw her as a glamorous point of contact with developments on the Continent. She showed an interest ...”

“... a squire) of the order of St Jane’. In 1949, after writing two books about Austen, Sheila Kaye-Smith had a conversation with her about electric lamps and radios. Inevitably there have been squabbles over whose Austen is the real one. Lionel Trilling warned the new reader of her novels that ‘Jane Austen is to be for him not only a writer but an issue ...”

“... In 1729, with the immortal Newton two years dead, a London mathematics teacher and draughtsman, Andrew Motte, even managed to bring out an English translation of the whole of his greatest work. There has never, until now, been another. It has understandably taken the Harvard historian of science I. Bernard Cohen and his collaborators much longer to produce ...”