“... respect rather than disposable celebrity. She has contributed to some of the better documentaries: James Ellroy, Anita Ekberg, Eric Sykes, watershed BBC2, air-hostesses and desert roads, midnight fodder on Channel 4, the real lost memories. She likes to use old film, degraded archive footage, and to have it reshot on tape, fed into her slim box of ...”

“... from the family coat of arms – was the product of a landed Cheshire family whose estate, Eaton Hall south of Liverpool, dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary honour was a baronetcy conferred by James I in 1622, largely to raise revenue; the first baronet must have been a disappointment in that ...”

“... Ghosts keeps up the old Modernist ways. ‘Here they are. There are seven of them. Or better say, hall a dozen or so, that gives more leeway.’ Thus the opening of Ghosts. It could be the first paragraph of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. Better for whom, one wonders? And leeway for what, exactly? Why, for more such calculated inexactness. ‘Tell them ...”

“... or seven operas flourished in the theatre – nothing could have kept them down; so in the concert hall did the Requiem. All that is utterly changed. Verdi’s 26 operas (28 if you count revisions under new titles) have all been performed; few, perhaps two or three at most, seem unlikely to hold the stage. Julian Budden’s three-volume study is only the chief ...”

“... portrait now flanks John’s in the College’s Council Room, advised his students in the anatomy hall that, in order to ‘avoid giving offence to the populace’, they should ‘out of doors, speak with caution of what may be passing here’. To ‘the populace’, their researches seemed fearful, particularly because of their hunger for recently dead ...”

“... the credulity of Salem. Influential manuals of witchhunters like the Malleus Maleficarum and James VI’s Demonologie warn repeatedly that the devil can remain unseen, take possession of one of his votaries and, through this instrument of his will, cause prodigies as well as mayhem. Theories to explain the Salem witchhunt have followed fast and furious ...”

“... for as long as he had been alive, according to the nightly news shows. (His partner, 23-year-old James McDonald, died from wounds received in the same incident.) You felt that the statistic might have given pause to the TV bulletins, transmitting what appeared at first, to jet-lagged eyes, to be file footage of freeway snafu: a cortege of squad cars and ...”

“... is real’ – his sole invention being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s ...”

“... to the temptations of the flesh than some of his real-life counterparts: ‘I head across the hall into my bedroom, where Deborah Lane is already opening her bag of goodies.’ She says good morning, he takes off his shirt. And then – surprise! misdirection! – ‘she puts her stethoscope on my bare chest.’ One ticking time bomb just isn’t enough ...”

“... than his father’s because of its connections with royalty (she was remotely descended from King James I of Scotland); at school, he boasted so much about the (alleged) venerability of his title that he was facetiously nicknamed ‘the Old English Baron’. Occasionally the pretension turned more prickly: invited to join a formal procession, he sulked for ...”

“... Carrie Kipling, once arrived at their house in Sussex to find Rudyard in a sweat in front of the hall fireplace shovelling a pile of his manuscripts into the flames. It was a horrifying sight, especially to a publisher. ‘For heaven’s sake, Rud, what are you doing?’ Doubleday asked. To which the answer came: ‘I was looking over old papers and I got ...”

“... short is that quite modestly substantial ones (by the standards of Alice Munro, let alone Henry James) come to seem monumental. Two of these longer pieces, not widely separated in the book, make claim to some sort of symmetry with their titles (‘The Cows’ and ‘The Seals’), when in fact they represent opposite extremes of Davis’s dealings in ...”

“... on all charges. Ascribing their politics to ‘a warped understanding of sociology’, Mr Justice James sentenced the four to ten years’ imprisonment, reducing Prescott’s 15-year sentence to match. By this stage, supporters were going round London with badges proclaiming ‘I am a member of the Angry Brigade,’ and Time Out was running as front-page ...”

“... Verga, the verista novelist admired and translated by D.H. Lawrence (and discussed here by James Wood on 10 August) – is the key to Sicily, where people like to explain, over the most concentrated espresso drunk anywhere in Europe, exactly why everyone else’s version of an incident or situation is flawed, self-interested, corrupt or downright ...”

“... 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 ...”