“... are kept down, but Frayn takes us inside, backstage, closer to the noises off. He also trawls the North London streets where his parents started out, trying to get a measure of his origins and to work out where to place himself – or his young self – socially. ‘Lower-middle class’, the answer he usually gives when asked, is an over-simplification. The ...”

“... they were never going to be able to penetrate the narrow alleyways of the sprawling slums in the north and west of the city. In most cases they didn’t even try. Muqtada’s forces responded, as they have in the past when facing an attack in one place, by spreading the battle to Baghdad and every other city and town where their forces are strong. Local ...”

“... the sort who thought Rangers fans should be sent to Australia on coffin ships, or made to work the North Sea oilrigs for no pay – and Uncle Peter for a while appointed himself the very man who would, as he delicately put it, ‘get all that poofy shite oot his heid before it really does him some damage’. Game on. But not for long. Uncle Peter arranged to ...”

“... of the country when ‘sovereignty’ is passed to the Iraqis. A loyal secret police, says John Pike, a military expert in Washington, means ‘the new Iraqi political regime will not stray outside the parameters that the US wants to set.’ It will ‘reign but not rule’. Meanwhile, power will largely remain with what is now called the Coalition ...”

“... the Andy Warhol Museum on Sandusky Street, where Andrew Warhola was born in 1928. As the director John Waters has said, every kid needs someone really bad to look up to, and the Warhol legacy carries on that counter-cultural role for a new generation. The museum recently organised an exhibition of the prison photographs from Abu Ghraib. In rural West ...”

“... family in Portsmouth. It is worth remembering that these were the years when, further to the north, Wordsworth was fascinated by starving children, beggars, aged shepherds and broken veterans of the French war. Copeland, whose essay in Jane Austen in Context is accompanied by others of comparable value and interest, turns up again as the editor of Sense ...”

“... The novelist Dorothy Richardson, a film critic for Close Up, saw women with infants at a cinema in North London on a Monday afternoon in July 1927, their ‘faces sheened with toil’, ‘figures of weariness at rest’. The notion that the cinema might be a sanctuary for mothers persists in the current fashion for weekday mother-and-baby screenings – though ...”

“... and a maelstrom of demolition and construction surged on our doorstep. The whole of the area north and east of Liverpool Street Station was slowly engulfed as Broadgate, a Leviathan even among London’s new mega-developments, advanced nearer and nearer. I would wake to find that there was nowhere to buy dinner that day; the local butcher’s and a row ...”

“... what Alford calls ‘formidable ambition and startling ignorance’, an expedition to find the north-east passage set off in 1553, armed with a letter from the king extolling the universal benefits of a shared treasury of the high seas. The mariners were briefed on how to manage alien encounters: the native should be treated warily yet courteously and ...”

“... It was completed some time after 1607 and stands in the sacristy of a church in Bassano Romano, north of Rome. Visitors can compare it with a full-size cast of the statue Michelangelo made from the second block, the original being in the Roman church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Michelangelo normally worked from the front of a block and probably hadn’t ...”

“... from the newly occupied territories.Mahmoud’s family came from Qastina, a village about 25 miles north of Gaza City in Mandate Palestine. His father, whose parents died when he was young, had been raised by an aunt in the port city of Yaffa, where he remained until 1948, when the family were driven off their property by Zionist militias, and taken by boat to ...”

“... and for the same reason: their attractions are calculated by eyes which are neither Roman nor North African. One tends to see what one knows and Gérôme knew what a pretty French girl looked like. He took great pains with the tiles, marble, robes, baths and so on, but suggesting that you know just what things look like physically (although I am not sure ...”

“... to do with them, fearing them as she has been taught to do. She’s hoping to run far enough north that she finds the French, who may be ‘papists’ but at least are not ‘heathens’. This tiny, starved body running through the woods takes on allegorical proportions. She is the servant who runs from the cruel master; the woman who runs from the man ...”

“... of many men, including her husband, at the barracks on the Viale Giulio Cesare in Prati, a quarter north of the Vatican. Laura Lombardo Radice, a central figure of the communist resistance and the leading light of this and several other protests during the occupation, said she saw Gullace rush towards her husband, who was standing on the other side of the ...”

“... secretary of state for energy in the late 1970s, was that Britain should use its tax revenue from North Sea oil to build up a sovereign wealth fund. Norway did this, and has become one of the richest countries in the world; Benn’s idea was not adopted. The advocacy of greater democracy in these pieces often has a strong populist flavour, with frequent ...”