“... lush, romantic account of the enormous, bloody, dust-filled adventure of empire. Morris – who as James Morris had fought in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers during the Second World War – describes military expeditions, noble defeats and brutal victories with the same rousing relish. It was a good book to give to dreaming 13-year-old boys. But now I wonder ...”

“... pool closed, my family followed the herd to Majorca. The Broadway was converted into a bingo hall, then a squash court and amusement arcade. I spent hours pushing coins into the penny falls, until in 1984, the year I turned seventeen and UK cinema attendances hit rock bottom, I moved to Glasgow.But my mother still lives in Prestwick, so I noticed when ...”

“... only nor mostly by sociologists – on just how the British class system works. And is the music-hall artist Marie Lloyd, overt topic of Eliot’s essay, its real topic? Or does she not serve, as token-figure and pretext, to fill in one otherwise unoccupied corner of the Eliot persona? ‘You say he has no demotic sympathies? Why, look here.’ An ...”

“... where the real playwright J.M. Synge lived and the fictional Stephen Dedalus pissed against the hall door – unless, as he says, it was Mulligan. (‘—Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.’) And this is another example of Joyce pitching bodily against literary product, to transgressive effect. His concern with the body’s ...”

“... wilderness.) The last of his three successive residences, finished in 1763 and known as Johnson Hall, was an elegant Georgian structure, surrounded by satellite ‘lodges’ and other outbuildings; close by was the village of Johnstown, which he had founded for the benefit of his many tenants and retainers. His personal life was no less extraordinary. He ...”

“... their behalf. When, therefore, at 21, after a lifetime of being told she was headed for Carnegie Hall, she failed the entrance exam for the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, her life collapsed. In her autobiography and in many interviews Simone blames her rejection on racism. She didn’t get in, she was sure, because she was black, not because she wasn’t ...”

“... are the inevitable routine and business missives (Thomas’s sharp exchanges with Chapman and Hall will be of keen interest to publishing historians). The main revelations are of the domestic life of the couple, now in their 25th year of marriage. They confer on the everlasting ‘servant problem’ and invent a little language of tenderness via their ...”

“... self-congratulatory dinner held to celebrate completion of the original OED in Goldsmiths’ Hall on 6 June 1928. This was Derby Day, which allows Winchester to describe the social scene and to opine: ‘A great horse race on a sunny afternoon tends always to bring out the best in people’ (at least it brings them out in their best). The occasion had ...”

“... Reunion headquarters was the Harvard Freshman Union, constructed around an immense, long dining-hall where, as first-year students, we had taken all our meals together before dispersing to the Harvard Houses. I arrived to find a throng of apparent strangers holding drinks, but soon familiar faces appeared. Many of my classmates, I thought, looked remarkably ...”

“... ideas while obscuring his overt possession of them. That he chooses to read a fiction in a lecture hall rather than a lecture enables him to pose the unspeakable instead of talking about the impossibility of speaking it. Last year he and I took part in a conference in Holland on the problem of evil. The participants fumbled around with the primary grotesquerie ...”

“... The subtitle of James Shapiro’s engaging new book is a tease. Shapiro, the author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), is in no doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the mid-19th century ...”

“... weakness of the government’s response, in 2019 when the Cube, a nearly new seven-storey student hall of residence in Bolton (it opened in 2015) was devoured by a fire that spread with frightening speed from the fourth to the sixth floor via its cladding. The building was swamped with firefighters – almost one for each of the more than two hundred people ...”

“... set depicting an upmarket holiday home. David spoke of Martin Buber, played a clip from Annie Hall and threw in some tips for tongue-tied office workers; nothing he said seemed stupid or objectionable. At regular intervals we were invited to pair off and discuss our answers to such questions as: ‘What assumptions do you think people make about ...”

“... artist called Plamen Goranov left his home in the Black Sea port of Varna and walked to the City Hall. He climbed the steps that led to the entrance of the imposing Soviet-era building, which is set in the middle of a park. An armed guard asked him: ‘What are you doing?’ He told the guard he was going to set himself on fire. From his backpack he took out ...”

“... on Broadway and in movies. After her death in 1937, a memorial concert was held at Carnegie Hall. But Smith’s country cousins – ‘walking musicians’ – were lucky if they got recorded at all. ‘They were the offside,’ the Mississippi talent scout H.C. Speir said. ‘They never was known … to anybody.’By the time record companies got round ...”