“... was abandoned, its history constituted by rumour and myth. ‘Only those who are belated,’ Susan Stewart writes in The Ruins Lesson (2020), ‘can observe a ruined form.’ What seems like a dawn to us was belated to begin with. As Emily Wilson says in the introduction to her new translation of the Iliad, it ‘came at the end, not the beginning, of a long ...”

“... Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken ...”

“... about the shelving of the Newsnight investigation into Savile. Girls from Duncroft children’s home had given evidence: some of them were 14 when Savile began coercing them into giving him blow-jobs. They felt it would be ‘an honour’ to be in the company of someone so famous. He promised them visits to the BBC studios and one of them says she saw Gary ...”

“... exciting. The annual fee for an arts student at University College Dublin was £100. Someone from home told me that he wandered into Theatre L one morning as Denis Donoghue was lecturing and noticed me staring at Donoghue with my mouth wide open, as though I was hearing an amazing piece of gossip for the first time. Donoghue was lecturing about the short poem ...”

“... artists shared the mass conversion of their race to FDR’s Democratic Party, which was also the home of working-class ethnics and those Jews who did not stand further to the left. Politics was not a subject about which people whose life was music thought very much. For black artists, the savage and pervasive racial discrimination was a deeply resented fact ...”

“... do his aesthete’s thing against nature. For Salisbury, there was Hatfield House. Hatfield was home, Hatfield was friendly chaos, Hatfield was where the private man was revealed. Hatfield was where the Hobbesian world, the world of warfare between the possessing and the non-possessing classes, ended. But Salisbury, a sensitive, nervous, scientifically ...”

“... rather unsavoury disciples – most prominently among them, the racist ‘philosopher’ Houston Stewart Chamberlain – and after that by Cosima’s English daughter-in-law, Winifred. Wagner proved for many Englishmen and women the perfect expression of the night-side of European life: the first of these strange disciples, Jessie Laussot, makes her ...”

“... evidence can be overcome by fervour, at least for a time. Medicine is different. It is the natural home of the untested hypothesis: acupuncture, homeopathy, osteopathy and chiropractice flourish. And it is a happy hunting ground for the enthusiast; health stories are hot news. So a heavy responsibility falls on those who publicly promulgate hypotheses whose ...”

“... could deplore patriotism (making an ironic exception only for her feelings for Yorkshire, her home county), and could happily spend college dinners discussing such questions as ‘Why do rich people always get so dull?’Neither Cambridge nor classics, however, retained her permanently. In 1922, she decamped to Paris, and even before that – from not ...”

“... won over by the theatrical life, and before he had reached school-leaving age, he ran away from home to join a troupe of acrobats in Norwich called Bob Pender’s Knockabout Comedians. When his father found him, he made him return to school, where Archie did his ‘unlevel best to flunk at everything’, as Grant later said. He got himself expelled, and ...”

“... she was fond of her own way and saw no reason not to have it in matters of state as well as at home. All in all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and ...”

“... Charles Reade led a strenuous campaign in the Daily Telegraph which successfully pushed the Home Secretary into remitting the sentence. Riots were feared in Liverpool after the conspicuously unsound conviction and death sentence passed on Florence Maybrick in 1889; but executions generally fed a public appetite. Twenty thousand people went to watch ...”

“... A more typical female role model of the conformist period was June Allyson, pouting loyally at home while James Stewart, camped out in the Mojave Desert, manfully concerned himself with the creation of the Strategic Air Command – a theme that took advantage of the B-36’s capacity to fill the Cinemascope screen. The ...”

“... leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from filming, recording or ...”

“... bought a new 78, enjoying the sound of big band and some American singers. One week she brought home a record by Elvis Presley. Her son already knew the name: the previous weekend in the local barber’s he had come across a photo of the ‘most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the ...”