“... Divorce’ begins: Many divorce cases were handled in my father’s court. The court was nothing more than our living-room, where my father kept his religious books and the ark for the Torah scrolls. As the rabbi’s son, I never missed an opportunity to listen in on the petitioners who came for a divorce. Why should a man and a wife, often parents of ...”

“... lifted from another song on Cooke’s Live at the Copa LP.Maybe; but to my mind, it makes no more sense to imagine that Redding forgot the words to this song – already a Civil Rights anthem – than it does to think that Louis Armstrong had ‘forgotten’ the words to ‘Heebie Jeebies’. It may be closer to the truth to say that, outside his ...”

“... of literary fraud. One of his first publications, Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782), takes sixty exhaustive pages to demolish those who still believed that Chatterton’s poems were genuinely medieval, and his edition of Shakespeare devotes thirty more to discrediting a feeble ...”

“... who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ‘all this’ is still debated. The way in which the commotions began tends to support the view of, among others, Abraham Lincoln and Harold Macmillan that events are the motors of history, not policy ...”

“... biggest-selling newspaper in the world. There was a crackle and dazzle to it. Fleet Street had no more experienced and mischievous proprietor than Lord Beaverbrook, no more technically gifted editor than Arthur Christiansen, and few more celebrated reporters than the paper’s defence and ...”

“... Fludde: all those young boys, for one thing; an apparently Christian pageant that sometimes feels more like a complaint against God than a celebration; a body of musicians designed – because of the presence of so many children – to be out of tune with itself, so that the notes are constantly shifting and wavering, unsettling the consolations of Tallis’s ...”

“... of encephalitis lethargia that was triggered by the flu. But that’s it. Most people know more about smallpox, or the plague of 1665. Why should this be? The flu was unprecedented in its virulence and global in its effects. Yet it came and went like a noxious fog, like something outside human understanding. Aids (or HIV-disease, as medical authorities ...”

“... paragraphs to a page) and separated by a space equivalent to two lines of type. Every page or so a more substantial suspension of movement – a ‘beat’, it might be called in the theatre – is marked by a row of three dots. A paragraph both preceded and followed by a set of such dots is a rare event and perhaps flags up a special status for the words ...”

“... Faulkner, then in dire penury, had concocted to sell and which, one hopes to his annoyance, sold more than all his previous works. Today his entire canon is available but no volume that I have looked at in our local public library has been issued to more than three subscribers each year. His fine As I lay dying, which ...”

“... collabos when he died in 1944. Fernandez expresses hurt that in those years Liliane didn’t show more enthusiasm when sending him off to meet his father, an emotion that hindsight might have been expected to put into perspective. She was a passionate anti-Nazi – and there were pupils at Fernandez’s own school who were shot by the Germans. In a ...”

“... liked to talk about American speech, and to say (correctly) that their poems captured that speech more than their peers’ poems could. Both achieved popularity despite the grim attitude in their best poems, and both discovered too late that their authorised biographers despised them. (In Creeley’s case, the culprit was Ekbert Faas, whose unwieldy tome ...”

“... whether any of these items, or the housemaid, were recovered. That isn’t surprising. What is more remarkable is that we know about their loss. Daisy Hay’s book covers a period in the second half of the 18th century when the magnification of the historical record is rapidly increasing. Details are becoming ever sharper. Hogarth’s ‘scenes of ...”

“... As a saga should be, it is based on oral tradition: the authors have spent years interviewing more than eight hundred people, recording ten million words. They show a remarkable command of scale, moving adroitly between the broad outlines of social history and the daily detail of Pollock’s life. They take the view that Pollock’s mother destroyed his ...”

“... Institute of Technology are fond of merry japes, locally known as ‘hacks’. One of the more memorable happened one night in October 1958 when an MIT fraternity had the idea of initiating new members by making them measure a bridge over the Charles River connecting the Cambridge campus with Boston. Crossing the bridge was often a wet, windy and ...”

“... doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained. There is far less tolerance for the disorder and tyranny that people like Nkrumah, Lumumba and Nasser instigated in the name of ...”