“... possessed. Bleak House itself, home of the virtuous Mr Jarndyce, is described in the words of his ward, Esther Summerson, with laborious syntax mimicking her first exploration of it: It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen ...”

“... give a jolt if somebody once thought it broken. If we can believe the testimony of the effect of Ward Six on Lenin, or of Les Misérables on the young Whittaker Chambers, the bridge is also a dynamite-stick; whether a book gets used one way or the other depends to a shocking degree on the reader. Nussbaum’s vision is big-souled and communitarian; she would ...”

“... all of these victims were women, children, the elderly, sick or mentally ill, but according to John Laughland in the Spectator, their deaths do not count because most of them are ‘buried in individual not mass graves’. Yet it seems clear to most of us working here that a great deal of violence was inflicted on people in quite small groups. Unprotected ...”

“... for instance, she provides a lively account of the intricate emotional manoeuvres performed by John Banks’s splendidly over-the-top costume drama The Island Queens (banned under Charles II in 1684, rewritten and rehabilitated under Anne as The Albion Queens, 1704), during which Mary and her victorious antitype Elizabeth enjoy the first of their many ...”

“... any knowledge of the contracts, hired Clinton’s defence counsel in the Jones-Lewinsky affair to ward off charges of corruption. The Volcker Commission, set up by Annan to investigate profiteering from the Oil for Food programme, was obliged to look into the matter. Despite the incontestable fact that Annan had met with Cotecna executives, one of whom ...”

“... that Benny Goodman, ‘The King of Swing’, recorded ‘Eeny Meeny Miney Mo’ (vocal by Helen Ward) shortly after the great ‘King Porter Stomp’ (1935)? Waller and his group typically recorded six or eight new numbers every two months. Often he’d see the music for the first time at the recording studio. A brilliant quick-study, Waller would set up a ...”

“... I ran away.’ I was never able to, and never even considered it. One day my mother announced that John Gielgud was coming to Cairo to perform Hamlet at the Opera House. ‘We must go,’ she said with infectious resolve, and indeed the visit was duly set up, although of course I had no idea who John Gielgud was. I was nine ...”

“... of their own heads. It afflicts English studies as it does most others, and had a recent airing in John Carey’s inaugural lecture at Oxford which proposed that scholars handle texts whereas critics only vandalise them by reading them. This double and triple illusion usefully affords occasion for simple restatements: that, for instance, to read at all is in ...”

“... in along the way an incestuous rapist, a factory that specialises in white paint, a psychiatric ward, a succession of radical meetings and a night-time battle between the Brotherhood and Ras the Destroyer. It delivers an overwhelming aesthetic experience through an immersion in comic extremity, vernacular, streetscapes and – frequently ineffable ...”

“... the private sector sets aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, pioneered the popular benchmark of the NHS’s success or failure, the hip replacement operation. They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too ...”

“... the aristocratic Calthorpe Estate, which was still tending it carefully as late as the 1960s, when John Madin was commissioned to design by far the best modernist housing in the city for the area. Other social improvement plans have grown out of it: Edgbaston adjoins Aston Webb’s overripe Victorian university buildings, and is close to the rangier, folksier ...”

“... and then as assistant editor of the Times, of which he might have become editor if Barrington-Ward had had his way. He wrote a great deal at this time. International Relations between the World Wars, first published in 1937 (under a different title), is a very useful little work if you want to look up, say, the details of Reparations. In this period, he ...”

“... context needs the expanded sense it doesn’t always have in English. Barthes is a moralist, as John Sturrock says in Structuralism and Since, because ‘moral passions and distinctions excite him,’ and his apparent flightiness is often a form of scruple, a refusal to lay down a badgering law. Sometimes it is just flightiness. Elements of Semiology both ...”

“... options (food which is brought in and heated up on site), there are ‘enhanced ward-based kitchen services’ (this turns out to mean such things as toasters and kettles), plus the delights of the food court, with its burger chains and sandwich outlets. Addenbrooke’s has responded to customer complaints that none of this food is ...”

“... the Hudson to West Point with friends for the day. Brooks had already been the mistress of General John Pershing and had helped break up the marriage of the British admiral Sir David Beattie. She was introduced to the glamorous young Superintendent. It was, in Perret’s view, a case of mutual and instantaneous lust. Others diagnosed the meshing of public ...”