“... drama Wat Tyler. It passed out of sight, to emerge, in 1817, from the firm of Sherwood, Neeley and Jones – ‘associated’, says Storey, savouring the mischief, ‘with polite travel literature or smart editions of legal texts’. The pirated text of Southey’s flaming youth was nicely synchronised with two Quarterly Review articles, anonymous but easily ...”

“... go to heavenHe nasty like the old time, old no. 7.On ‘Rhymes like Dimes’, Doom sampled Quincy Jones and James Ingram’s ‘One Hundred Ways’, and produced just as many quotable lines. Or, as Dunbar put it in ‘We Wear the Mask’, he mouthed with myriad subtleties. As Doom says in ‘Hey!’, another song from Operation: Doomsday, he expressed himself ...”

“... Current Biography, July 1976. Edgar L. Doctorow was born in New York City on 6 January 1931 to David R. and Rose Doctorow, whom he has described as ‘old-fashioned social democrats’. His grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Doctorow grew up on Eastburn Avenue, in the Bronx. His mother was a pianist and his father had a store in ...”

“... do at the ceremony, in deference to his orthodox kinsmen. This was in 1978, shortly after the Camp David Accords with the Egyptian Government of Sadat. Shepherd was one of those alarmed by Israel’s new right-wing government, headed by Menachem Begin: religious parties allied themselves with the right-wingers, rejecting Labour and the old ...”

“... Nearly 25 years ago, when Valentino Achak Deng was six years old, his village in Southern Sudan was razed by the murahaleen, paramilitaries working for the government in Khartoum to suppress the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Achak was separated from his family and driven from his home; he was lucky not to have been killed. The people of Marial Bai, like the inhabitants of thousands of other villages across Southern Sudan, were suspected, if not of being rebels themselves, then of providing the rebels with material support ...”

“... at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials summoned the newly appointed British ...”

“... setting suggests murky dealings – with John le Carré being thanked, under the non-pen name of David Cornwell, for ‘irresistible reminiscences’ – rather than any particular glamour. Serena Frome (the pronunciation of her name, Froom, poshly at odds with its spelling), both intelligent and beautiful, is the daughter of a bishop. Originally her gift is ...”

“... to dispose of their dog, for no particular reason except to ‘simplify their life’. The boy, David, of kindergarten age, can hardly share this hope but makes no plea in the animal’s favour: ‘The dog has crammed itself behind the pipes beneath the kitchen sink. David squats before him, blowing gently on his ...”

“... in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA ...”

“... How great a diversity, Swift can hardly have imagined; it needed the researches of a William Jones or a Wilhelm von Humboldt to begin to persuade literary Europeans that they were not quite the masters of the speaking world. Now we know better – well, perhaps just a little. We know that something like four thousand languages are spoken in the world ...”

“... Cup Final ...’ ‘When we had Huw Wheldon at the BBC ...’ ‘When we were first married ...’ David Hare calls the curators of these arcadias the ‘whenwes’. They guard their territory with a dogged devotion. Although the theatre is a medium that exists entirely in the present tense, it is not immune to the arcadian virus: ‘the National Theatre at ...”

“... closeness.’ This storyline looks as if it is loosely based on Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones, proprietor of the Wall Street Journal. Quite a few plot lines from Succession are like that, half-pinched from real life: where Rupert Murdoch appeared in front of a parliamentary committee to declare it ‘the most humble day of my life’ in response to ...”

“... privacy is even now being fiercely defended by Stephen Spender against the intrusive Hugh David. There has recently been the quarrel between Nabokov’s biographers – the publishing rascal Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric records? Did Lawrence Durrell commit ...”

“... his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest ...”

“... designs, such as the abortive plan for London County Hall in 1907, borrowed from Wren and Inigo Jones, without paying any interest. Others, like the Rand Regiments’ Memorial in Johannesburg of 1911, dished up Edwardian Baroque at its most pompous and flatulent. Moreover, in this premier league, the referee could be stern and the spectators ...”