“... for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American ...”

“... good goal ruled out for offside). His successes within Portugal were not just luck, however: he took a poor team and turned them within a matter of months into the dominant force in Portuguese football, bringing in new players, changing the side’s tactics and insisting on discipline. He revealed himself to be ruthless, shrewd and highly ...”

“... than just an academic dispute about scraps of paper in the archives,’ the Anglo-German historian John Röhl wrote in 2015. ‘It marked the point at which civil society in the Federal Republic admirably turned its back on a difficult past to embrace Western values and share its destiny with that of its neighbours. The transformation was profound and ...”

“... and ‘high jinks’ – and framed events as though they were fictional. The playwright John Guare, who called Knox ‘my kind of murderess’, wondered whether she was a heroine in the mould of ‘Daisy Miller, an innocent young girl who goes to Europe for experience? Or is she Louise Brooks, the woman who takes what she wants and destroys ...”

“... When Alexander saw him, fat and huge and coarse-faced (for he was dark in colour, too), he took an instant dislike to him, hating him both for the way he had plotted and the way he looked. He ordered them to thread his feet with a bronze bit and drag him around in a circle, naked. Jolting miserably over the rough terrain, he began to wail. This – the ...”

“... similar. After a talk suggesting the end of the world was not nigh, a Jewish Angeleno came up, took me to one side, and burst into a confession of how fearful he felt about Armageddon. Though born in the US, and with no direct link to old Vienna, he was unmoved by the high-profile alliance between US and Israeli foreign policy – was this not an ...”

“... in the distance.’ But how else, Hardy said, laughing, could he have written it? (Lawrence, who took so much from Hardy, has ‘the dawn is wanly blueing’ in Sea and Sardinia.) It is one of the signal pleasures of Claire Tomalin’s superb new biography that she has an eye for this kind of thing in Hardy, and quotes so well from him. We know a good critic ...”

“... separated from the southern Catholic Netherlands, still governed by Spain, first in the person of John of Austria. By the end of the century, the ever more numerous Dutch soldiers came to be quartered in northern towns and villages, and it was their prerogative to plunder the countryside. A squad under an officer might emerge from town to waylay a rich convoy ...”

“... a broad acceptance of the Thatcherite settlement left future governments reluctant to change it. John Fraser, then Labour MP for Norwood, warned against the ‘economic interdependence’ a private testing regime would create. ‘That would be extremely dangerous,’ he told Parliament in 1983. ‘The building industry’s record in respect of ...”

“... versions of the story; it was beside Wilde’s in another. In either case, he later wrote that he took the sponge, wiped his name out and made his way quickly to the railway station. Gide, who was 25, had met Wilde before in Paris and Florence. He left three accounts of their meeting in Algiers; some of what he said was later hotly denied by Douglas. The ...”

“... for TV. Patten, who seems to have accepted Dimbleby’s electronic eavesdropping even before he took up his post in Hong Kong, is of a generation and culture brought up on the power of TV’s seductive simplifications: if baulked by the Foreign Office, he tells Dimbleby, ‘I’ll do what I’ve always done; which is to take the first opportunity in front ...”

“... without warning – deep into one’s narcissistic wounds. Not long ago, apropos of nothing, she took mournful pleasure in observing that with my whimsical new blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention ...”

“... for having lost a note his mother once left in his lunchbox by breaking the glass on Dad’s John Coltrane poster, and Dad understands. The book’s emotional landscape may be desolate but it is fully energised. The sections flit from parable to skit to list, with sudden swerves, so that an odd dark fable about fraternal conflict ends as an exam ...”

“... of work on the hydrogen bomb to set out his case. He entrusted extracts to the Princeton physicist John Wheeler to check the accuracy of his account of the Teller-Ulam design. Intending to read the document on the overnight train from Princeton to Washington, Wheeler managed to lose it. The sleeper car was taken apart in a desperate search, but the document ...”

“... and years!’ The bouncy tone is explained by this being a fantasy of what Baker might say to John Updike in the unlikely event of their finding themselves playing a round of golf together. It was the sure convergence of apparent incompatibles that gave The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) its impact, even for readers who found William Beckwith, the studly ...”