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“... One of the many excellent photographs Barry Webb has assembled shows Blunden going out to bat with Rupert Hart-Davis, in a match between Jonathan Cape and the Alden Press. That was in 1938. Blunden looks miniature, a frail determined Don Quixote with eagle nose and jaw, who had persuaded the burly Yorkshireman as they set out for the crease together not to wear batting gloves, which were unsporting ...”

“... disinterested person? The reality of a nationalised industry is, alas, not something that Sidney Webb or Herbert Morrison ever contemplated. It is immensely grieving to say so, but most public enterprise has turned out to be just what all those selfish and heavy-handed capitalists predicted: inefficient, wasteful, monopolistic, unresponsive to the needs of ...”

“... to do pretty well, especially the women. Jane Addams is here, no doubt rightly, but not Beatrice Webb. Susan Anthony, Emily Balch, Carrie Catt, Mary Lease, Margaret Sanger – all these appear on the American side, balanced (if that is the right word) by no less than three Pankhursts (Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia). John P. Altgeld, not perhaps a household ...”

“... beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried banner portraits of Sean McDermott, Kevin Barry and, no doubt, other martyrs. I didn’t stay long because the wind was bitter, the pavement covered in slush and my bones frozen to the marrow. These parades make the Americans look like imbeciles. But, the first page: I wrote it twice, satisfactory ...”

“... of his homecoming ‘when we can laze in a daisy chain’. ‘But in the Morning No’ (from Du Barry Was a Lady, 1941) – a duet which went on for ten refrains and was banned from the airwaves – the courting couple politely enquire about the sexual possibilities for an early morning romp, including anal sex:She: Are you good at figures, dear? Kindly ...”

“... March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John ...”