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“... naked man crouching at the bottom of the Bayeux Tapestry, his genitalia on full display. (In 2018, George Garnett achieved brief internet fame by counting the 93 phalluses, human and equine, shown on the tapestry, and documenting their states of tumescence.) Medieval manuscript pages often have a stately central text surrounded by rollicking activity. Nuns ...”

“... who worked to abolish both agencies, and Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick and head of the NEH under George I, who wanted to absolve American history from any critique whatsoever. (When I’ve seen these two on TV again lately, I’ve wanted to cry out, like the kids in the horror film Poltergeist, ‘They’re back!’ Can Newt Gingrich, another failed ...”

“... but a makeshift coathanger he has rigged up over the bath in order to dry his anorak.14 January. George Fenton tells me of a memorial service he’s been to at St Marylebone Parish Church for Maurice Murphy, the principal trumpet of the LSO, who did the opening trumpet solo in the music for Star Wars. The service due to kick off at 11.30, ...”

“... I looked forward with keener and keener anticipation. Indeed, like John Osborne waiting for Max Miller to come on stage in whatever provincial repertory theatre it was that he had sought him out, I found that I began to laugh before the Field-Marshal rose to speak and that while he was speaking I was reduced to tears by the pain. He was a Cheekie ...”

“... be decorated for gallantry. This book has been put together from conversations recorded by John Miller and John Powell for the BBC. They were delightful broadcasts: talking off the cuff, Gielgud rambled backwards and forwards over his life; he rarely paused and then needed only the gentlest nudge to set him off again, bowling down the years. Cut together ...”

“... to these standing stones and circular cairns that punctuate the fields. In the manner of Hugh Miller, stonemason and essayist, the grain of Ascherson’s thinking is apt to spark off these heathen formations, these ‘ritual spires of condensed fear and memory’, as he calls them, and a melancholic attitude accompanies the notion that the modern age can ...”

“... version of MacDiarmid’s pastures to work at the London Review of Books, the editor, Karl Miller, had a powerful sense of what connected literature to the land, and even the urban writers he liked – Kingsley Amis, for instance – were filled with a sense of hinterland, or winterland, of childhood places and beginnings. Many powerful writers, in ...”

“... that he is reworking a cliché about Irishness. As Oliver MacDonagh put it, quoting Lloyd George, in States of Mind (1983), his magnificent study of the mutual bewilderment that has chiefly constituted Anglo-Irish relations, ‘while the English do not remember any history, the Irish forget none’ – a ‘familiar facetiousness’, he went on, which ...”

“... books and papers so that it can be used for the filming.I first saw the house in 1968. Jonathan Miller lives in the same street and Rachel, his wife, saw the ‘For Sale’ sign go up. It belonged to an American woman who kept parrots and there were perches in the downstairs room and also in its small garden. Slightly older than the other houses in the ...”

“... Wolton (an exceptionally rare woman in this group), the partnership of Alan Colquhoun and John Miller. In the 1970s and 1980s most of these could be found designing mews houses and studios in Camden, Hampstead and Islington, all of course included here. All were a cut above the usual intellectual level of 1980s architects; Colquhoun, who died last ...”

“... Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.’ But alongside the blessings, kicks and curses is a running lament for the novel, which Vidal sees as being in deep trouble. From 1956 ...”

“... version was commissioned for a production at the Old Vic but was turned down by director Jonathan Miller, and a straightforward translation by Eric Korn was used instead. It’s not hard to see Miller’s objections. Beyond fulfilling the basic plot requirements, 1953 barely connects with Racine at all. It brims over with ...”

“... most vivid in ‘7, Middagh Street’. 7, Middagh Street was the three-storey brownstone rented by George Davis – literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar at the time – and tenanted by Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee; shorter-term residents included Louis MacNeice, Auden’s lover Chester Kallman and Salvador Dali. The poem ...”

“... going. We got the book, and in due course Konishi arrived to spend 15 months at Stanford (when Sir George Sansom was writing his history of Japan there). From Konishi’s elaboration and our collaboration a book appeared called Japanese Court Poetry. Using the knowledge (and filing system) of a lifetime, Konishi is writing a 600-page book a year. The ...”

“... on her return to Wimpole Street (‘I want to be with you all,’ she wrote to her brother George, ‘– none away but those whom God has taken’), though once safely ensconced there, she set herself to conform as closely as possible to the paternal will. By retreating to the security of her room, she could not only keep her father from losing ...”