“... their behalf. When, therefore, at 21, after a lifetime of being told she was headed for Carnegie Hall, she failed the entrance exam for the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, her life collapsed. In her autobiography and in many interviews Simone blames her rejection on racism. She didn’t get in, she was sure, because she was black, not because she wasn’t ...”

“... where the real playwright J.M. Synge lived and the fictional Stephen Dedalus pissed against the hall door – unless, as he says, it was Mulligan. (‘—Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.’) And this is another example of Joyce pitching bodily against literary product, to transgressive effect. His concern with the body’s ...”

“... Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, two young cross-dressers who were put on trial in Westminster Hall in 1871. Cross-dressing was not a criminal offence, so the men were charged instead with outraging public decency. On the slightest of pretexts, the prosecution also threw in ‘the abominable crime of buggery’, along with conspiracy to incite others to do ...”

“... second published novels, drew heavily for inspiration on Wuthering Heights. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has a doomed gathering whose names all begin with H. Jane Eyre has the unquiet invisible ghost of the red room, and – more significantly – the preoccupation with food, starvation, sustenance. Considering how bad The Professor is – it was the only one ...”

“... his courage. That was several months ago. When I went back recently, this part of the exhibition hall was empty and the gloomy photographer had gone. In the early days of the crisis over Kuwait (the authority for this is Yasser Arafat, who has a house here and spent much of his time with Saddam after the invasion), the President thought the Americans would ...”

“... the top of the greasy pole of academic life, represented by the Disraeli Fellowship at Holy Christ Hall, Cambridge. He succeeds. But throughout, Sefton comes from behind, not like the victorious dark horse, but like the furtively libidinous dog, taking his pleasures in dark and dirty places. Peeping Tom is set in Cornwall, a place Jacobson has oddly chosen to ...”

“... way and Southey settled for her younger sister. When brother and sister-in-law were sharing Greta Hall later in life, they both seem to have regretted missing each other, and Southey had some hard things to say about the deceased wife’s sister act. On the other hand, one doubts Sara ever really regretted becoming Mrs Coleridge, although she used to talk in ...”

“... giant building, that high-bounding wall/Those bare-worn walks, that lofty thund’ring hall …/… a prison, with a milder name’. Still, this game of identification shows how strong the legend of the workhouse is, and how obsessive the need to commemorate an iniquity long since ended, but never completely atoned for or sufficiently deplored. We ...”

“... the law, Parliament, corporate capitalism and the empire), and his parody (which targets music hall, opéra bouffe, extravaganza and melodrama). It’s the parody that interests Williams most, and her book is essentially about Gilbert as a critic of Victorian theatre: theatre that transmogrifies foreigners; trades in ludicrous coincidences, revelations and ...”

“... yet to be appreciated by Westerners.’ George Harrison and Ravi Shankar at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 September 1974. Images of Shankar – sitting cross-legged on a carpet, playing his sitar – have become synonymous with Indian classical music, yet when his story is told it too often focuses on his starry associations. Through his friendship with ...”

“... unionists and Italian Marxists were forever dropping in on his house in Spitalfields, which Stuart Hall recalled as a ‘sort of permanently open unofficial conference centre with some informal seminar always in permanent session in the kitchen’. In 1967, Samuel founded the History Workshop movement to democratise ‘the act of historical ...”

“... voters in 1945; or a better comparison might be with the United States in 1960, when the dazzling John F. Kennedy seemed to represent the beginning of a new age after what his supporters saw as the suffocating and mediocre years of President Eisenhower. The under-forties in particular, in Australia in 1972 as in the United States in 1960, suddenly felt ...”

“... institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far been fragmentary and diffuse. They articulate deeply-felt arguments against the type of reform Russia is undergoing and warn of the dangers of social upheaval if it continues in the same way. Both writers ...”

“... has gone horribly wrong, and the solace the authors find in the architecture of Caruso St John or Eric Parry does not make up for it. No guide to London’s architecture has ever been so successful. Regularly updated from top to bottom every decade or so since its first publication in 1983 it obviously fulfils a need. There is no shortage of guides to ...”

“... Both here and in his earlier study of the Edinburgh Review and his first volume on Macaulay, John Clive shows no desire to use or manipulate the Victorians. He merely wants to understand them better. And what he comes to understand, as G.M. Young did before him, is that the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the way we think Victorians ...”