“... séance, and a hotel fire which carries off the intruments of Enderby’s inspiration (an electric kettle and box of strong tea bags), prove these fears well-founded. Yet Enderby himself is hardly at fault. Indeed, he starts to look Shakespearean. Swayed by the Terrebasse company, like the Bard by Burgess, Kemp et al., he gives the public What it Wills, As it ...”

“... the culmination of a dislike of Browning that began when he ruined her new carpet by putting a hot kettle down on it has perhaps no more than anecdotal value, but to know that Haydon’s short sight and his relatively cramped studio meant that he could never stand far enough back from his work to get a correct sense of proportion not only adds to an ...”

“... joyous exchange of fire. Edward went with quiet deliberation into the kitchen to put on another kettle, and having, with care, poured himself out a fresh cup of tea, he came back unhurriedly into the room and threw the contents of his full cup over his mother’s face which, under the impact of Earl Grey became even more blotched than usual. It was the ...”

“... Haydon approaches a crisis in his unhappy career. Browning annoys Jane Carlyle by putting a hot kettle down on her new carpet. Haydon takes his own life. So, from day to day and street to street, the sublime and the ridiculous appear in the proximity they occupy in life. This is surely one reason for the rise of microhistory, that it brings the texture of ...”

“... many suggestions he made that evening was that, when I was in Dublin again, I should go and see Michael Yeats, the son of the poet, who might be glad to meet someone who was interested in his grandfather as much as his father – and to spend time with someone who was brought up, as I was, in a Fianna Fáil family (Fianna Fáil being at the time the main ...”

“... Put on the kettle and make the tay, and if they weren’t happy, that you may. By the time he wrote this, O’Malley knew all about post-revolutionary disillusionment. He went on to produce a sequel, The Singing Flame, which is less accomplished but possesses much of the ...”

“... burned in the fireplace, which bore evidence of a ‘fire so large as to melt the spout off the kettle’. More probably it was taken away by the killer. This is another of Jack’s signatures: what is known in the lexicons of Ripperology as the ‘harvesting’ of body parts. This murder scene is the most gruesome even by the Ripper’s standards. Kelly ...”

“... Every technological innovation the Europeans brought with them – the mounted horse, the gun, the kettle – was acquired and adopted by Natives. In his headlong rush to overturn the Dee Brown story, Hämäläinen ends up reproducing some of its most dubious elements. The focus on military confrontations between the ‘fledgling United States’ and Native ...”

“... told the Conservative party conference last year. ‘In fact he wrote me a letter about it. Dear Kettle, You’re black. Signed Pot.’ On issues ranging from civil liberties to aviation, Labour has assailed the Conservatives from the right: ‘If they are helping us define ourselves on the centre ground of British politics,’ George Osborne, Cameron’s ...”

“... Thames had long been used as a common dump for human and animal excrement. In 1855, the chemist Michael Faraday was horrified by the river’s appearance and stink: ‘The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid’; ‘The smell was very bad’; ‘The feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface.’ The coincidence ...”

“... tea (the lie had its basis in an unrealised EU proposal to ban the most power-hungry category of kettle as an anti-climate change measure). It’s the violence of the language, the attempt to whip up fear and hatred of a pitiless alien force that won’t listen to reason, that has no concern with national tradition or culture: the idea that Brussels wants to ...”

“... to lick his wounds. He would keep licking them for decades, nursing his grievances into a fine kettle of vendettas. Meanwhile, Making It would go down in legend and out of print, a sunken landmark of sorts. To mark​ the fiftieth anniversary of Making It, NYRB Classics has revived Podhoretz’s battle-scarred memoir with an innocuous new introduction by ...”

“... choices, very difficult after a long ‘sleighride’ behind the whale, bouncing around like a tin kettle ‘at the tail of a mad cougar’ – as Stubb, the Second Mate, says. To cut the line was to lose the catch. Not doing so could mean being plunged bows-first below the waves and dragged still deeper – losing the boat, and perhaps the men, to the ...”

“... whose names were a constant struggle for her. ‘You know, darling the actor!’ she’d say of Michael Caine. ‘The curly-haired one who kills all the nignogs with the hay tutus and enormous spears in that film your father likes, I call him Alfie.’ She sold arrangements to Jean Shrimpton, Alec Guinness, Tony Blackburn, and others whose names she got ...”