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“... elsewhere alludes to Breuning’s testimony that Beethoven incessantly (and at all hours of the day and night) jotted down ideas for fear of forgetting them. The young Breuning is intrigued by the appearance of a Beethoven sketch-book, which he finds on a piece of furniture in Beethoven’s apartment (‘it was completely full of notes, written in fits and ...”

“... tabloids reported in March that the chairman and vice-chairman of Newcastle, Freddie Shepherd and Douglas Hall, had ridiculed fans who paid the extortionate prices for replica shirts (and said that Geordie women were ‘dogs’), six million was wiped off the club’s share value. Peter Johnson spent his first quarter of a century as a fan at ...”

“... drinking with artists who were busy inventing their reputations. One night, I sat at the bar with Douglas Gordon while he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell ...”

“... to establish the king as a player in wartime decision-making, most notably when he was championing Douglas Haig, Jones sees his contribution as having less to do with what he did than with his status, which made him the object of generous patriotic feeling. During the mass mobilisation of 1914-16, men joined up to fight for ‘king and country’, with ...”

“... addresses were in Kentish Town, off Oxford Street and in Bloomsbury, all plaque-less to this day no doubt, though Red Ken, before he faded to a more electable off pink, might have thought of honouring this most ragingly anti-authoritarian of London’s asylum seekers.) In 1872 Vallès was sentenced to death in absentia by the courts of the new and as yet ...”

“... Wilson’s delay in devaluing the pound. His sense of social detail is acute, as he reports Alec Douglas-Home’s doomed attempts to be trendy (he announced in a 1964 election speech that his party ‘is delivering the goods and it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first ...”

“... Agata. Silent and restless as a mongoose she used to move about from room to room the whole day, a dust towel in her hand, in search of something to scrub. She drives away the other servants, destroys the furniture, hates the dog and walks in her sleep. In a permanent rage, she is close to cheerful only when one of Munthe’s patients is about to die ...”

“... 1970s, Neo-Expressionist painting looked even more absurd than it did before. As critics such as Douglas Crimp and Richard Meyer have stressed, this queering of art was also a matter of content. If the persona behind Abstract Expressionism was the ‘action painter’ in existential torment, Warhol put pretty-boy idols of mass culture up front, such as the ...”

“... Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the street, and the woman made an offer well above the market rate. ‘Frederick had just sold his ...”

“... acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in America, self-conceived and self-constructed. The land was purchased in 1966, after Snyder returned to California following periods as a Zen Buddhist monk in Kyoto, in the engine room of an oil ...”

“... so far. It was, he says, ‘well up to the standards of the best British philosophical work of the day’. What he finds most admirable about it is ‘the way Russell unearths a single set of principles as responsible for problems which emerged in such a wide range of work, encompassing geometry, physics, psychology and pure mathematics’. ‘Few ...”

“... Washington on this matter at the outbreak of the Gulf War. In the Los Angeles Times on 18 January Douglas Hurd listed the factors that authorised Britain to use force against Iraq, giving prominence to the 12 UN Security Council resolutions against Iraq, and, in particular, to the call for a full and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. He ...”

“... that the present ceasefire in Ireland ‘will bring Ireland closer and closer to civil war every day that it continues’, he says as if coining the thought for the first time that ‘the year 1994 is more like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four than the real 1984 was. In 1994, we are beginning to understand the full force of the Orwellian slogan, “Peace ...”

“... each other once, that’s all,Nearly twenty years ago.We were not close and yet I knowHis death-day stretched beneath a pallOf melancholy that would leaveSomething of its gloom behind ...Or Anthony Thwaite:Now what you feared so long has got you too.The blankness has descended where you lieDeep in that building you already knew ...Or Steve Ellis:Hull was ...”

“... of their visionary experiences. Corso, who had a thing about doors, was lying on his bed one day when he saw the doorknob turning, the locked door opening. A seizure that occurred a second time on Crete. ‘Skinless light.’ He was young, clean; he wasn’t dreaming. There was a form in the light, pointing straight at him. Immediately he wrote a letter ...”