“... In New York, these tensions are deeply rooted. In the 1830s, when the Irish took over Tammany Hall, one of the most keenly debated policy battles was over the abolition of slavery. Daniel O’Connell told his fellow countrymen in America that slavery was a ‘foul blot on the noble institutions’ of their adopted land. The Liberator exhorted ...”

“... Vietnam but was told by the chairman to sit down. He refused and was eventually dragged from the hall to a mixture of applause and shouts of ‘shame’ and ‘undemocratic’. McNamara and his party seemed worried, Lewis concluded, and ‘Labour tacticians admitted they had made a mistake by giving Mr Gott another headline.’‘Our intervention in Hull ...”

“... through the wilderness; Saint Guthlac sits alone in his fenland hermitage; Heorot, the mead hall where Beowulf feasts before fighting Grendel, stands in the middle of a swamp. Readers of these poems might be surprised to learn that early medieval England had cities. York, which had been a Roman garrison town, flourished as a trading settlement (or wic ...”

“... of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting hall for hire, weddings a speciality), that is being prepared for its tent-show apocalypse, has never previously been part of the Greenwich story. The peninsula, if you check it out on a 19th-century map, is a vestigial tail, a pre-amputation stump known as ...”

“... had rescued Mike Nichols from a man with a fierce dog in New York. He had fought physically with Peter O’Toole, using a broken bottle. He had got the overflow from his lavatory to pour a jet of water onto the head of a woman who was making her car hoot in the street below. Often it would be nothing more than an ugly exchange at a drinking party for which ...”

“... in Leicester, Manchester and Birmingham. One of the brothers stands prominently at the back of the hall holding a mobile phone. It rings very loudly and the speaker breaks off. The man with the phone walks up and down talking intently in Arabic. Then he shakes his head. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘so much for the great tradition of freedom of speech in this ...”

“... him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ‘dinosaur’ if they came from a Peter Taaffe or Alan Woods, but he is inoculated against such criticism by his youth and avoidance of jargon. In many respects, he is the best thing to happen to the non-compromised, non-New Labour left in the mainstream media in decades: he makes ideas that are ...”

“... 1st September 1939 finding him not in a dive on 52nd Street but in some bleak provincial drill hall having those famous bunyons vetted for service in the Intelligence Corps. Auden might (and some say should) have condemned himself to five years as a slipshod major, sitting in a dripping Nissen hut in Beaconsfield decoding German intelligence, with ...”

“... he has secretly invested in McCoy’s securities firm, Pierce and Pierce. A sodden British hack, Peter Fallow, who works for the depraved newspaper City Light, is assigned to the case of the white assassin who is supposedly being protected by friends in high places. (One of the more mordant truths proclaimed by this novel is that in high places there are no ...”

“... he favoured. The latest biographical and interpretative analysis of Gould is by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, the author of interesting psycho-biographies of Nijinsky and Robert Schumann; a good amateur violinist, and a friend of the pianist, Ostwald died of cancer before his book was published, but was apparently able to finish his manuscript despite the ...”

“... Men. It was published near the end of 1599 (at some point after its registration at Stationers’ Hall on 17 November), so ‘lately’ probably means A Warning had been playing at the newly built Globe, which opened its doors that summer – a crowd pleaser in that all-important first season in Southwark, cheek by jowl with their chief competitors, the ...”

“... charming event in the official national calendar gather for a cup of tea in the Georgian town hall of a small market town in the West Midlands. There is a great deal of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral ...”

“... them and hangs them up in his apartment. He gets the pleasure of Charles I pacing a banqueting hall replete with Van Dycks. Hilfiger gets to feel he has captured the thing that is truly seen to capture his time. The spirit of the age is a bundle of famous rags. Going, going. Gone. But what of poor Marilyn herself? What is she? And who was she before all ...”

“... press, but the press talked about her, and after her scandalous romance with the divorced Captain Peter Townsend they talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as the id of the Windsors, beside her twinkling mother and impeccably dutiful sister. Margaret moved with the ‘fast’ set, drank, smoked and sometimes looked bored at official events. By ...”

“... she encountered that she feared their matches would never strike on her box. My dear old friend Peter Bull, much-missed these days, once had me watching him in Waiting for Godot. I left at half-time under the impression that he didn’t speak in Act Two. ‘What made you think that?’ he demanded when next we met. ‘I thought that was what you ...”