“... and unconvinced, marred in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who ...”

“... exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and Tynemarch did not return my call. But here is what Martin Kane, Severn Trent’s director of customer relations, said in an interview with Radio Gloucestershire shortly after the floods: ‘The risk of flood defences being breached at the Mythe was – I think it was something like a one in a thousand chance of ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... all return after the revolution, when automation has eliminated drudgery and we shall live as Peter Pans in paradise. It’s the totality for ‘kids’ because children already know life without boredom, constraints, separation – some of the time at least, mostly when they’re at play rather than detained in school. ‘There are no limits to ...”

“... canny, entertaining book Surf’s Up – a summa theologica of Beach Boy lore and legend – Peter Doggett sums it up: ‘As ever with Brian and the past … the details altered sharply in each new telling.’ Sometimes during the course of the same interview. As if this or that reminiscence were simply one more of the musical ‘feels’ he said flowed ...”

“... political strategy.’ As it fell out, many of the Civil Rights leaders who worked closely with Martin Luther King had been trained by Niebuhr’s students, or were conversant with his thinking. King’s great ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’ would mention Niebuhr as a source of the precept that ‘groups tend to be more immoral than ...”

“... streets of the capital and triggered the violence of the June Days.The Düsseldorf artist Johann Peter Hasenclever captured such a moment in Workers before the City Council. Painted in 1849 and widely exhibited in a number of versions, it shows a delegation of labourers whose work-creation scheme – excavation work on the various arms of the Rhine – had ...”

“... to replace the slow fermentation of traditional bread). Whitley calls sliced white bread ‘Peter Pan bread’ because it doesn’t age in the usual way. Both modern bread and modern flour are designed to be ‘shelf-stable’, something modern milling techniques have made possible.Other than Borlaug’s experiments in plant breeding, the key ...”

“... straightforward rule, named for the then chair of the Basel Committee, the Bank of England’s Peter Cooke. It states that the ratio between a bank’s ‘capital’ and ‘risk-weighted assets’ – the Cooke ratio – must be at least 8 per cent. This figure wasn’t the result of any explicit cost-benefit analysis: it appears simply to have been chosen ...”

“... a pedestal frequently end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or soil it for ever: for every Nelson Mandela, there is an Aung San Suu Kyi. Greta Thunberg at 16 is one thing, but it is hard to picture her going at it with the same intensity at ...”

“... of Germany, worked with think tanks such as the Bertelsmann Stiftung, and labour experts such as Peter Hartz (the later disgraced HR boss of VW), to devise a new model of labour market management and welfare. As Schöllgen’s biography reveals, in the minds of Schröder and his entourage, this programme of reforms became linked over the winter of 2002-3 ...”

“... Charles Addams ‘and his wife, Deborah Kerr’. 24 September. Marcel Marceau dies. Much hated by Peter Cook (‘Marcel Arsehole’), who couldn’t stand the reverence with which mime was treated. Still it gave him a good joke: ‘I was there,’ he used to say, ‘the night Marcel Marceau dried.’ 2 October. Ned Sherrin dies who very much figured in the ...”

“... as much as Les Misérables, which she had read before she was nine. She also read Jack London’s Martin Eden, a book about a self-taught writer which she later suspected had given her inspiration for her future life. A schoolteacher called Mr Starkie, recognising an unusual capacity in the girl, lent her The Sorrows of Young Werther. She started keeping a ...”

“... of national self-sufficiency? Is it still? Rover, Morris, Austin, Triumph, Vauxhall, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Mini, Land Rover: when we hear the names of these firms, we think of the cars they made, and of cars driven by parents or grandparents, sisters or old boyfriends. But we also think of the places in Britain where the cars were built, places ...”

“... published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow Martin (author of The Secrets of the Great City, 1868, which mentions ‘cheap hotels’), the London Baedeker, Cooper’s The Prairie and Hamlet’s ‘overwhelming question’ – ‘“To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Perhaps also OED 6: “to pop ...”