“... rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating each’. He also knew John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, who – Taylor said, again memorably – was ‘nervous and still, deeply learned, a silent reservoir with a gleam’. Taylor’s daughter Una later wrote Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside ...”

“... site in the lesbian imagination. Stein and Toklas, Barney, Romaine Brooks, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Dolly Wilde, Janet Flanner, H.D. – we’ve been hearing about them for ages and the line-up never changes. If anything, thanks to influential (and romanticising) books like Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1986) and Andrea Weiss’s Paris Was a ...”

“... are known for having made great work by such inartistic means. One is the naive artist: the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson reputedly arranged his masterpiece, Pet Sounds, by sitting all day with a small orchestra and singing each instrumentalist his part. He’d have the ensemble perform, then he’d make alterations, listen again, and so forth, until the ...”

“... teachers until 1967, newcomers were not bothered by the crackdown, preferring martyrs to thinkers (Thomas More and John Fisher were canonised in 1935). Father Basil Maturin, the only priest to attend the excommunicated Tyrrell’s funeral in 1909, confessed that ‘an overpressure of authority does not really trouble me much.’The indulgence of overpressure ...”

“... the Tories. ‘In seaside areas, traditionally, politics have been quite fluid,’ said Norman Thomas, who produces Thanet Watch, a local investigative magazine. ‘There’s a feeling that lots of Tories are waiting to see which way the wind blows before jumping ship to Ukip.’ Thomas believes those most likely to vote ...”

“... tones of the doorframe and the road in the foreground; and a panel showing tourists on the beach, the tents and the sea related by a tinny blue, and the clouds created out of the colours of the sand and the women’s dresses. In these works, Sickert was deploying Whistler’s preferred alla prima, or ‘wet on wet’, technique, which Whistler also ...”

“... the seeker for black pearls, the man who prefers the monsters of the deep to the sunshades on the beach, will find in The Overcoat shadows linking our state of existence to those other states and modes we dimly apprehend in our rare moments of irrational perception ... At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the ...”

“... in the pyramid gave entry to a network of underground tunnels. The fabled Chinese Limehouse of Thomas Burke and Sax Rohmer, of Oscar Wilde’s opium dens, has long gone. And now the Good Friends restaurant in Salmon Lane, to which hungry diners travelled from all over the city, has followed them: converted into a store for building supplies. The spirit of ...”

“... A jolt of paranoia. They have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts, called the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The machines cost half a million pounds ...”

“... in the wrong.’ ‘She never once asked me what I did,’ Plath’s downstairs neighbour, Trevor Thomas, said. ‘She never asked me if I painted, or if I drew, or was I an artist. I could have done a portrait of her if she had been co-operative.’ This is a startling complaint, from someone who was nearly killed when the gas from Plath’s apartment sank ...”

“... Water restaurant in Cobham, on top of Snowdon, for the Romney’s House extension, on Criccieth beach; Swedish Classical at Bishop’s Stortford, Oxford, Belfast; Baroque at Bushmills or, over-hurriedly, less successfully, at Stowe. While it is true that he could gag up – the phrase we all preferred was ‘clough up’ – that pair of ...”

“... By the time I got to Belfast and phoned him again the line was dead. 13. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacCurtain, a known figure in the IRA, was gunned down at his home on 19 March 1920. The late-night callers were three members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. One of them was later identified as District-Inspector Oswald Swanzy. The Chief Secretary for ...”

“... making him seem like an American saviour who took a bullet for his own people.The shooter, Thomas Crooks, was wearing a T-shirt for a YouTube channel called DemolitionRanch, which has 11.7 million subscribers. He was a registered Republican who donated $15 to ActBlue, a register-to-vote pressure group. He was killed instantly by Secret Service snipers ...”

“... moved in after coal went was drugs. Day trippers and dog walkers come to the bright expanse of beach just down from the harbour mouth. It’s only half an hour by car or train from the southern edge of Blyth to the centre of Newcastle, and the town is becoming a satellite of the big city. ‘Most of Blyth, in all honesty, has kind of recovered from the ...”

“... designer gas Freon, properly chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), developed in 1930 by the American chemist Thomas Midgley for General Motors Frigidaire as a substitute for the poisonous liquid ammonia previously used in refrigerators. Freon is almost chemically inert, non-poisonous; it boils at room temperature. It did a great job in the air conditioners that were ...”