“... speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington.15 March 1994. A reply arrives from John Major to a letter I’d written to him trying to ...”

“... his will that Coleman perform at his funeral. With Coleman’s death, an era closes. As the jazz DJ Phil Schaap said, ‘I have the feeling of the conclusion of the age of the prophets.’The pianist Cecil Taylor performed an elegy of shimmering delicacy,1 punctuated by hints of an impending storm. Ravi Coltrane, John Coltrane’s son, gave a stately reading ...”

“... the town, though I’ve always come back to see my family. When people asked where I was from, I’d say it was a place called Nearleeds, because no one had heard of Dewsbury, unless they’d read Betty Boothroyd’s biography or remembered who Eddie Waring was. But then the headlines started coming: the highest BNP vote in ...”

“... into Jackson’s life in the Middle East was offered recently by a young man who goes by the name DJ Whoo Kid, has a radio show on the New York station Hot 97 and produces work with gangsta-rap outfits with names like G-Unit and Lil Scrappy. According to MTV News, ‘Whoo Kid says he originally connected with Bahrain’s royal family when he was recommended ...”

“... In Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, Dorothy Moore – a retired music-hall chanteuse and the wife of a moral philosopher called George Moore – is going dotty in her bedroom. The precipitating cause is a televised fight between the first two astronauts to land on the Moon about who gets to go back home on a damaged lunar ascent module that can carry only one ...”

“... is visiting Long Beach,’ she declared, urging the manager to hold a reception for King at City Hall. He refused: ‘He’s a troublemaker and we don’t want him here.’ This minor incident goes unmentioned in Jonathan Eig’s new biography of King, of course. But it illustrates a theme to which Eig returns several times. People of every political ...”

“... and even 19th-century Britons celebrated a range of patriotic anniversaries, most of them to do with resistance to Roman Catholicism. And even when the memory of these wore thin, there were so many other powerful cements. Insular geography, overwhelming Protestantism, and a cult of Parliament kept the three parts of Great Britain together, as did an ...”

“... to the same English classes as Rania said, ‘and she gave off a sort of spirit of blessing. You’d leave the party saying: “I want to be a bit more like Rania, and act that way.”’She said she would happily have a dozen children. She found it easy. She was incredibly relaxed with her two, letting them paint their faces and daub the bedroom cupboards ...”

“... that usually disappoints. The ability to manipulate a formula rarely overlaps with the ability to do without one. Hensher is confident enough of his handling to put the thriller plot on hold for 150 pages in the middle of the book, before picking it up again in a darker key. The genre stabilisers are taken off the bicycle – and it glides off again with ...”

“... and in the sometimes, I thought, jejune poems of his collaboration with John Fuller, Partingtime Hall. The novelty in Manila Envelope is that nonsense and ‘light verse’ are yoked to the most harrowing material, and more rigorously than in Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’, for instance, which might otherwise seem a model, because the material is that of public ...”

“... similar precautions, this would be a damning indictment of the Soviet system. On the other hand, Dr Georgi Arbatov deserved to be listened to when he told Radio 4 listeners that the dangers from panic were real. Is the British nuclear industry unnecessarily secretive? Do they hide information which they ought not to ...”

“... and Ernest Hemingway thought Cather had found the war experiences described in One of Ours in D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation. After her literary success, Willa Cather led a secure, lofty, comfortable, solidly middle-class life. But it took her forty years to do so. Born in 1873 among the lush hills and ...”

“... from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? – strikes a deflationary note familiar enough from recent television interviews. It had a lot to do with the fact that in September 1400 the historical Glyn Dŵr had proclaimed himself Prince of Wales. Some ...”

“... among people. Sennett believes that artistic performance – in the theatre, at the concert hall – can be our guide. No convincing actor or musician can treat her performance as the occasion to reveal her inner thoughts and feelings. That isn’t what the play or the music is about – we come to hear what Shakespeare or Stravinsky wrote, not to find ...”

“... all the more rapidly since she had advertised her arrival by sending on ahead her portrait of David Garrick. Yet the London which threw itself at her feet two years after Hogarth’s death was still recognisably Hogarth’s town, a mixture of polish and jagged edges in which high taste and low life mingled uneasily. Kauffman’s reputation quivered a ...”