“... baby’, to ‘twist and shout’, to ‘let the good times roll’. The music was ‘designed to ward off the world outside and particularly adult life’, Springsteen said. It worked for him. Off stage, the past weighed him down; on stage, he said, ‘was where I master time’. Springsteen bet his life on music. ‘Whatever it took, I was in,’ he ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...”

“... university ‘in my spare time’ and had a ‘pash’ on her psychology teacher, the 24-year-old John Money. In Frame’s probationary year teaching at Arthur Street School, she stiffened, avoiding the staff teas. This is where her autobiography and King’s retelling, based on interviews, diverge, but in both she swallows a packet of aspirin, and wakes the ...”

“... it runs north into Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales ...”

“... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed ...”

“... Spitalfields. This is where people can go for relief if they are starving or homeless. The casual ward is the last refuge for people who are not in the House for good. On admittance, the hungry man, after being forced to strip naked and wash in a common bath, is locked up in a tiny cell with no furniture, where he is given the regulation supper of ½ lb of ...”

“... writing against the background of McCarthyism, told it in The Devils of Loudun (1952), which John Whiting turned into a play, The Devils (1961), which was itself the basis for Ken Russell’s 1971 film of the same name. There is also a more recent account, Robert Rapley’s A Case of Witchcraft (1998). Michel de Certeau’s Possession at Loudun, first ...”

“... value even to more obscure items such as the Irish writer Thomas Amory’s picaresque Life of John Buncle and The Triumphs of God’s Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Murder, a popular collection of tales of murder and revenge by the 17th-century Exeter merchant whom Coleridge called ‘honest Murthereo-Maniacal ...”

“... magnificent services to Beckett’s readers over the years one would not begrudge the publisher, John Calder (‘I finally arrived at Dover last Sunday with TV cameras waiting for me, the precious copies in my car,’ he confided in the Guardian when Stirrings Still was printed there), his moment of glory.Stirrings Still, in three parts, uses the now classic ...”

“... Jesuit academic which ought to be better-known, Shakespeare’s Religious Background by Peter Mil-ward, Hughes probes Shakespeare’s Catholicism. Following Milward, he notes that his mother’s family, the Ardens, were strongly Catholic, and that the head of the Warwickshire branch, Edward Arden, was first implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth ...”

“... to prevent the child being removed from the hospital where it was born; the child was made a ward of court, and then entrusted to the care of the couple who had ‘commissioned’ it in the first place. The Minister of Health promised a ‘fair wind’ for any Private Member’s Bill that would ban surrogate motherhood. As Nature (10 January ...”

“... second had to do with Latin American efforts, by the Argentine jurist Carlos Calvo and others, to ward off Europe’s attempts to collect debt by force and, occasionally, as in Mexico in the 1860s, sending in troops. The third was the shadow of a territorially aggrandising United States, speeding across North America like a whirligig, into Mexico and then the ...”

“... density of satirical allusion. He also admitted to missing the play of intertextuality in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a satire shot through with innuendo and obfuscation: ‘I did not understand that the Scene of Locket and Peachum’s quarrels was an imitation of one between Brutus and Cassius till I was told it.’ Nothing approached the ...”

“... interests. At Harvard, he studied under Delmore Schwartz. More important, he became friends with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, like-minded fellow students. On graduation Koch moved to New York, where he lived downstairs from the painter Jane Freilicher, became acquainted with the New York art scene, and liked to stare out of the window at passing trains ...”

“... ships, heaving seas, the swivelling turrets of six-inch guns; our island’s story, often with John Mills. And yet, for all its links with history, its invocation of Drake and Nelson, the grip of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist ...”