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“... sidewalk before slowing to a halt outside the green house at 83 Beals Street, the house where John Kennedy was born. The windows on the ground floor had curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got ...”

“... On a typical day​ , John Henry Salter would rise to shoot wildfowl at dawn. A GP in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy for 65 years (he died in 1932, aged 91, while still working as the local doctor), he ministered to his patients in the morning, tended his dogs and plants in the afternoon, gave his evenings to committees, and seldom went to bed without completing his diary ...”

“... with whitewashed walls and grey carpet tiles. On one of the walls a banner proclaims that there is no God but God. A panel of young, bearded men are sitting under the banner, facing a semi-circular swathe of TV cameras on tripods and photographers jostling for position. Behind the cameras are two rows of seats, some are occupied by journalists, others by ...”

“... to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher, the local council (careful, no doubt, with its ratepayers’ money) has allowed an insurance company to take over and manage a large part of the town’s shopping centre. In the interests of ‘safety’, this company now patrols the area with security guards, whose job it is to exclude the ...”

“... as follows: 1. The working class has refused to play the role allotted to it by Marx and shows no sign of doing so: or, as Engels put it in 1867, ‘once again the proletariat has discredited itself terribly.’ 2. ‘Actually existing socialisms’ do not inspire confidence either as models of economic efficiency or as vehicles of human ...”

“... Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”

“... sculptures, accepted the Tate’s invitation to do something in their domineering central hall – a space ostensibly built for showing sculpture but serving that purpose rather badly, partly because it makes the things put into it look as if they were lost at the bottom of a well, partly because its huge Ionic columns dwarf other forms in the same ...”

“... Benjy, the youngest Katz, has artistic talent, but he buries it for the service of the family. No Gordon would so waste himself. We follow the first generation and their children through war and slump. The Gordon fortunes rise; the Katzes have a rougher ride. The families intermarry and the offspring of the union, Diana, harmonises their clash. She goes to ...”

“... In 1838, the Preston United Independent Harmonic Brass Band wrote to Mr Thomas Clifton of Lytham Hall in Lancashire: Sir, by the desire of a Fue Respectable Friends of yours in Preston has caused hus to write to you with a Petition as a Solitisation for a job of Playing at your Dinnering Day as they told hus is taking place on Tuesday at the 10th of March ...”

“... John Mortimer’s book has a thoroughly misleading title. It is designed to enlist a little pathetic sympathy for someone carried along like a piece of flotsam without the courage or determination to strike out for the shore. It would be difficult – judging from the book itself – to find anyone less shipwrecked than John Mortimer and less likely to pursue this policy if shipwrecked ...”

“... few years, to 2 September 1914, we encounter another tableau of literary life that is, in its way, no less striking than our Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had been charged with doing something that would produce effective propaganda for the Allied cause, especially in the ...”

“... isn’t convinced by the case for voting for a lesser evil. ‘The suffering’, Noam Chomsky and John Halle wrote in June, that Trump’s ‘extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalised and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency’. My father ...”

“... and in such numbers that displaced students complained at being unable to get into the lecture-hall, asking that the too popular professor should move to somewhere more spacious, the Paris Opéra perhaps. When, in 1914, he was elected to the Académie Française, there was a run on the local flower-shops and the dais was fragrant with the bouquets of his ...”

“... for use in their own buildings. Inside the Amun-re temple, for example, in the Great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak and one of its mighty pylons, more than twenty thousand of Akhenaten’s handy little blocks were built into the foundations and walls. Other monuments at Thebes, and some of its outlying temples as well, were stuffed full of them, all neatly ...”

“... heart lies with the late 18th and 20th-century music he has done so much to advance in the concert hall. Whatever the reason for this comparative slightness, it’s a pity, since it was during those years that the horn developed most rapidly. It was then that the Waldhorn picked up the valves which made it chromatic without ‘stopping’, then that it ...”