“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”

“... jump takes us to passionate friendship with a girl from the local orphanage. She visits the music hall, playing gooseberry on her older sister, Sheila. In the final episode, her father gets a treble up, and stands Stella and her mother a day in Edinburgh. What appeals most in Smith’s novel is its cocky toughness. It is frankly xenophobic in a familiar ...”

“... knowing, cute, ‘in’, as Miss Didion claimed. What is objectionable about Manhattan, and Annie Hall, is that Woody Allen is publicly analysing a past love affair, with his past lover, on screen (Woody Allen used to be with Diane Keaton, as is well-known; as is also well-known, Diane is now with Warren Beatty, or was at the time of writing). Such ...”

“... none of them had children themselves. Supported by Tetty’s funds, Johnson established at Edial Hall, three miles west of Lichfield, what he described as a ‘private boarding-school for Young Gentlemen’. Following months of careful preparation, the enterprise was a disaster. Only a few pupils ever turned up, among them the future theatrical superstar ...”

“... not said. Field Marshal Montgomery sounds lonely, wistful and odd; the twenty-year-old Cliff Richard sounds painfully young, schoolboyish and eager to please. By the 1970s, however, Plomley’s questioning had begun to seem creaky. To the growing frustration of a cohort of radio execs, he rebuffed all attempts to tweak the programme, and went on, Hendy ...”

“... introduced the system of triage which all armies would come to adopt. Pirogov worked in the Great Hall of the Assembly of Nobles at Sevastopol, where, the young artillery officer Leo Tolstoy recalled, you were ‘assailed without warning by the sight and smell of about 40 or 50 amputees … Now, if you have strong nerves, go through the doorway on the ...”

“... agrees that she was and remains a brilliant natural performer. Whether speaking to a crowded hall or to a single voter on a doorstep or to her fellow pundits in a television studio, she is in her element. It is not just that she is fluent, vivid and engaging: she speaks in a way that erases distance, transforming audience and speaker into a common ...”

“... of Guerrero; and another mayor was assassinated when gunmen interrupted a meeting in the town hall of El Naranjo, San Luis Potosí. Hundreds more died less spectacularly. The violence is dizzying, all the more so because so little light has been shed on it by the press, either in Mexico or abroad. Most accounts stick to the official narrative: the ...”

“... father’s latest bankruptcy had left him penniless, so Cornwell taught for a while at Edgarley Hall, a prep school in Somerset, before going back to Oxford to complete his final year. He graduated with a first class degree in 1956. The next stop was Eton, where Cornwell taught German and French. He was impressed by his cleverer students but horrified by ...”

“... from England, stayed with Mike’s family in New Jersey (who took him to Radio City Music Hall where he probably saw the Rockettes), then moved on to California and took up studies with Yvor Winters at Stanford, an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. He got a great deal from his time with Winters and wrote about it at length in what may be his ...”

“... me repeatedly; he was convinced the Cubans had set him up.The press conference went ahead, in a hall packed with students, members of the local and international press, diplomats and representatives from the world’s liberation movements. Julia Hervé, the daughter of Richard Wright, came from Paris to interpret from ...”

“... Clarke, were being constructed nearby at the V&A. When they were exhibited in the sculpture hall their monumental scale made a huge impact on the students. As one of Boty’s contemporaries put it, ‘Painting? Too small!’ There was also the fact that there was much less competition to study stained glass than for painting. Boty’s decision no doubt ...”

“... a bang, but the rest knew nothing until, about twenty minutes later, Mr Kebede appeared in the hall in his stockinged feet, saying there was a fire in his flat. He thought it had started at the back of his fridge. He called the police before going to the door of his next-door neighbour, Maryam Adam, who was three months pregnant. ‘It was exactly 12.50 ...”

“... her 1967 picture of identical twin girls taken in Roselle, New Jersey, in a Knights of Columbus Hall. The twins’ father thought that it was ‘the worst likeness of the girls we’d ever seen’, but that was hardly the point. The girls are standing, posing, right beside each other. They are wearing the same clothes. And they are looking at the ...”

“... Paisley is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his biographer, describes the sinister shabbiness of this occasion, the nervous fascination of the audience laughing at a renegade Spanish priest reciting unfamiliar Latin words, the canny showmanship, the plastic buckets brimming with ...”