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“... Winter’s Tale dramatises a prose romance from 1588, Pandosto, appropriately written by the same Robert Greene who accused Shakespeare of being a plagiaristic ‘upstart crow’, while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and ...”

“... are audibly mapped.There are also thousands of memorable moments, some distinguished by hindsight (Robert Maxwell declaring: ‘I will have left the world a slightly better place by having lived in it’), some by the way radio forefronts every tic, hesitation and obfuscation, and some by personal revelation. In 2020, as Covid added a piquancy to the ...”

“... music, but there’s only one actual song on the CD, the perversely catchy ‘Celebrity’ (‘Go Gordon/Go Ramsay/Go Beyoncé/Go Beyoncé…’). So how is it supposed to work? Protest dance pop seems as unlikely a proposition as protest chamber music. Complicating the old debate about whether art can serve a political agenda is the still older debate about ...”

“... of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I ...”

“... The soundtrack might be Muddy Waters singing ‘You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had’ or Robert Johnson’s ‘Drunken Hearted Man’. Repetition, sexual boasting, showy licks and riffs: the novel has it all. There is even a touch of satanic folklore, in the shape of a ghostly hobo rumoured to be the devil himself. While not exactly ...”

“... Influenced by the very Englishly expressed Victorian socialism of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including H.J. Massingham, a former guild socialist who ...”

“... to outdated Dixieland jazz. In ‘Dexter’s Deck’ (1945), the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon interpolates ‘Sonny Boy’, one of Al Jolson’s most famous blackface numbers, introduced in his second talky, The Singing Fool (1928); as in Parker, Gordon’s manner is not bitter or satiric. The tenor saxophonist ...”

“... I also miss the less eirenic command of ‘ALL WEAPONS!’ from Queen’s theme song for Flash Gordon (1980), which used to be a ‘familiar’ quotation in the Burrow family whenever my sons launched themselves at each other or their parents. Poor Freddie Mercury only warrants the quotation of ‘Nothing really matters’ from ‘Bohemian ...”

“... The impression is rather like that which James himself registered after reading a selection of Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions … one smells the thing unprinted.’ James clearly matters to Tóibín more than any other novelist does, and The Master is probably his most self-scrutinising work. But you can see how ...”

“... back, with the next crimewave, after the next war. Fielding died in 1780, a few months after the Gordon Rioters burned down his home, his court and the record books so carefully kept by his clerks. Three years later, the American war ended, and this had the usual effect on crimes against property, in particular on street crime and highway robbery. Even the ...”

“... extended Article 2 to cover the death of Zahid Mubarek, a 19-year-old Asian prisoner murdered by Robert Stewart, with whom he shared a cell. Stewart was a violent racist – as the authorities knew when they allocated him a cell with his eventual victim.) The authorities had to act in accordance with Article 2, which meant, crucially for the outcome in ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural life for the best part of sixty ...”

“... staff and cabinet appointments (Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates et al) it was clear that Obama meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental ...”

“... and ‘absurd’ entered into common usage. One of Jeremy’s heroes was the war photographer Robert Capa, who had been blown up by a mine in Indochina in 1954 at the age of 41. The ideal life, we often joked, would have been to have spent the Twenties drinking with Fitzgerald and then been killed in Spain alongside John Cornford and Julian Bell. Jeremy ...”

“... industry was created in 1976 ‘over a couple of beers’ at a bar, in a conversation between Robert Swanson, a 29-year-old venture capitalist, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. Working with the Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen, Boyer had helped to develop some elegant recombinant DNA technologies which ...”