“... Nearer home, the continued intractability of the Northern Ireland conflict has led Simon Jenkins, in the Spectator, to condemn the current initiative by the British and Irish Governments to hold new talks on the province for its ‘centralism’. Instead, Jenkins offers the prospect of devolution to ethnic enclaves, the Catholic ones being ...”

“... in which we hear a great deal about the Saint-Simonians but very little about the ideas of Saint-Simon. A work of genius troubles the professional historian. He is happy to describe the social situation out of which it arose and its diffusion as a political force, but its power to move men across the centuries, like gravity in empty space, disturbs his sense ...”

“... years. The best painters of the period were their friends and fellow alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they ...”

“... registered in Consett, a depressed former mining town in County Durham. Working with Wirecard was Simon Dowson, a 26-year-old local with, by his own account, four GCSEs. He recruited hundreds of people in and around the town to act as directors for hundreds of shell companies, signing forms and forwarding paperwork, but otherwise having no connection to the ...”

“... public could watch serious debate between historical experts. Now they listen to the platitudes of Simon Schama or watch David Starkey astride the gun barrel of a tank pontificating about Henry VIII. Blair Worden, leading revisionist and elder statesman of 17th-century political history, is on record as worrying that ‘public life has never been less ...”

“... that pop music isn’t as good as it used to be, that commercialism has taken over. But some, like Simon Reynolds and Greil Marcus, emerge with their enthusiasms undiluted and are able to explore the links between the memorable moments and the groundbreaking acts, serving as a corrective to the inclination to see pop music as a series of unconnected ...”

“... In Los Angeles, his classes attracted Oscar Levant, the film composer Alfred Newman and John Cage. Schoenberg lamented his students’ ignorance but was happy teaching non-musicians. (One of his students was Jackie Robinson, who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball.) Schoenberg was far from lonely or in the ...”

“... and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from ...”

“... of Threevotes; Peter Paypaul Paperstamp, the sinecure-seeking poet of Mainchance Villa; Sir Simon Steeltrap, scourge of poachers on his hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who started out as the attack dog of the Anti-Jacobin, and Wordsworth, whose acceptance ...”

“... Simon​ de Pury, assisted by ‘a regular contributor to Vanity Fair’, has written a book about his ascent to the top of the art world: the auctions he conducted, the deals he struck, the parties he attended. It resembles a board game, with smaller parts assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king ...”

“... bathes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair and then anoints them with precious oils. Simon the Pharisee reproves Jesus for allowing her to touch him: ‘She is a sinner,’ he says. In response, Jesus absolves her: ‘Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.’ These many sins have long been assumed to be sexual, and the jar ...”

“... observations which epitomise the art of film come in as asides, as when, writing about Michel Simon, he invokes ‘the special mingling of self and character that is so necessary (and dangerous) in screen acting’. (This, by the way, is a rewrite. In the previous edition it read: ‘the special mingling of self and character that is so hallucinatory in ...”

“... sonnet, could apply equally well to its own powers of compression. Rule-bound and page-limited – Simon Rae’s introduction to News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems compares editing an anthology to doing a crossword puzzle – the Norton’s two volumes manage to give readers ‘infinite riches in a little room’. Little, but expanding. Like its ...”

“... atheist family. Abram and Elizabeth had seven children: Julie, Millie, Jay, Celia, Ann, Simon and Benny. Julie and Millie married ‘in’, their respective husbands, Harry and Sid, being successful businessmen in the clothing trade. Harry was a bit of a wide-boy, with a billiard table in the front room. He got mixed up in some shady business during ...”

“... Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”