“... he is read on a different scale from most of his contemporaries; McEwan is fond of quoting Henry James to the effect that the only obligation of a novel ‘is that it be interesting’. Yet you only have to think of James to realise that there are many more subtle, and perhaps more rewarding, ways of being ...”

“... arm. When he turned up in his not quite matching brown corduroy suit to the matriculation tea in hall, some took him to be a gardener who had wandered in to pick up a sandwich or two. We, his students, also wore our shirts open, with collars turned up. I sometimes still do. Twice a week I attended seminars which he delivered in his very imitable sardonic ...”

“... and too nobbly for a girl’s. He/she has also attracted the attention of someone in the snooker hall above the pub and there’s a lot of shouting. Later, as we are getting into the car, Gary, a young man crippled with arthritis, calls out to A. from the snooker hall. She knows him and asks if it was him that was doing ...”

“... by the primitive slapstick of 1914-15. Chaplin owed much to Fred Karno and the English Music Hall tradition – an area which film historians are usually ignorant about, and which they hastily sidestep. It is, however, an area in which Robinson is an expert, and the relationship with Karno, and the story of Chaplin’s stage career, is given an ...”

“... acts in the most charmless way imaginable. Rats and other things infest this preposterous Hall, where even the furniture is inimical to Gretchen’s well-being. Chair seats maliciously give way beneath her. A wicked spring in the mattress all but disables her. The lavatory won’t flush. An influx of pigs occurs (‘five stunned hogs lay at the foot ...”

“... The Reading Room of the British Museum is now completed, and if London had nothing but this hall of the blessed, scholars would make it well worth their while to make a pilgrimage here. All the sorrows of the outside would disappear in the mighty rotunda, and it is so quiet in this region of the eternal spirits that one can follow a thought into one’s inmost recesses ...”

“... be.On a Monday in late August 1956, somewhere around two hundred of us waited in the assembly hall of Dunfermline High School, wondering what would come next. We had stood to sing the day’s hymn and sat bent to mutter the Lord’s Prayer – the Scottish version, debts and debtors rather than the sibilant trespasses and trespass – and then watched as ...”

“... in the grate and a smelly tallow candle to hold back the night. Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Vaux-Hall’ (c.1784). For the price of a ticket, one could enjoy musical performances and refreshments al fresco, or simply see and be seen. Princes rubbed shoulders with prostitutes, duchesses with doctors’ daughters: the social mix was a large part of the ...”

“... suggest such a thing?) However, there is a certain family resemblance between the languid village hall in Florida designed by Krier and the replanned Italian town of Alessandria also featured in his book. ‘Modern is chronology, while modernist is ideology,’ Krier points out, to demonstrate that he isn’t a hopeless reactionary; he is perfectly ready to ...”

“... American followed a group of anti-Civil Rights protesters onto the plaza outside Boston’s City Hall. His picture shows Joseph Rakes, a white teenager, wielding Old Glory as a spear, lunging forward as if he were about to impale Theodore Landsmark, a well-dressed black attorney who’d had the misfortune to cross paths with the protesters. As Landsmark ...”

“... missile soon after Trump’s inauguration. The need for a change of tack should be clear. James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has admitted that Washington’s goal of pressing North Korea to give up its nuclear programme is ‘probably a lost cause’, and that ‘significant inducements’ will be required to deal with the ...”

“... Donegal and Cavan – in the Irish Republic. The colonial Plantation of Ulster in the reign of James VI and I covered six counties, but not those of today’s Northern Ireland. Ironically, the counties which became the redoubt of British Protestant settlement – Antrim and Down – were not technically part of the Plantation, which instead encompassed ...”

“... on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who ...”

“... of his father in A House for Mr Biswas, in which Biswas daydreams while reading the novels of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, and tries to use the word ‘bower’ because he found it in Wordsworth (by way of the Royal Reader). The sadness clouding that novel is that one is always oneself even when one does not know it; freedom is always qualified, a shout ...”

“... making. In an address to the Royal Television Society in 2018, the current director-general, Tony Hall, made clear that he viewed the ‘big shift’ to online and on-demand consumption as the corporation’s most significant challenge, and the one on which it would be judged. He also discussed two other problems: the need for more money to sustain the ...”