“... give away). Simon Leys, that wise Belgian Sinologist, critic and novelist, rightly notes, in The Hall of Uselessness, Simenon’s ability to achieve ‘unforgettable effects by ordinary means. His language is poor and bare (like the language of the unconscious) … It would be difficult to make an anthology of his best pages: he does not have best pages, he ...”

“... in February 1661, where he accidentally left some taffety ribbon and an ounce of silk on the hall table. The poor had to make do with a quick job done in the tailor’s workshop. Joan Cowling sent ‘shag and stuff … to one Edward Manley a tailor in Tiverton to make into a coat for her child in 1660’. It wasn’t much to look at, perhaps, but at ...”

“... locality; places which survived into the 1960s and were familiar to me, too. The St Margaret’s Hall and the Kinema Ballroom, Dunfermline; the Palais, Cowdenbeath; and the ‘Snake Pit’, Rosyth. That wasn’t the last’s real name, which neither my aunt nor I could remember. It was really no more than a big room above the Co-op store, near the roundabout ...”

“... suspect that my images of it were imprinted on my mind within minutes of moving in.The entrance hall, which was big enough to contain a large fireplace, had probably been designed to be used as a breakfast-room. The first thing seen on coming in was a statue two-thirds life-size, a wood carving of a helmeted guardsman with a shield and spear standing on a ...”

“... or bag to check you have the necessary equipment for the journey? Or take a final check in the hall mirror, ‘to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’? You don’t have a slave to guard your door, as the ancients did, so you set the alarm (or you set the dog, cave canem). Keys? Yes, they’re in your hand. You have ‘the power of the ...”

“... Europe for its private musical culture, during Schubert’s lifetime it had no dedicated concert hall or orchestra. Opportunities for public performance were hard to come by.Without a job at court and given his social background, Schubert had no access to the higher aristocratic patrons who subsidised Beethoven, and, as a freelance composer disinclined to ...”

“... searched Australia for a town called Carnegie so that he could stand in front of its town hall with his body obliterating the word TOWN and be photographed for the cover of his album BARRY HUMPHRIES AT CARNEGIEHALL. Nowadays Edna satisfies that urge on his behalf. She punishes Australia for its vulgarity by personifying it for a startled world, and ...”

“... hundreds of thousands were built, had a bourgeois look. Coventry Cathedral and the Royal Festival Hall were modern architecture on a human scale. Though a high proportion of Londoners were being rehoused in flats, the LCC forbade the construction of blocks more than six storeys high. So there wasn’t a visible ‘social revolution’, or an invisible ...”

“... Raikin in Oxford just after the degree ceremony. Raikin was the most famous of all Soviet music-hall comedians. I had encountered him on the train going back to London and had shown him the first volume of Mandelstam’s Collected Works, which I had only just received from Struve. Raikin was so overwhelmed by it and the fact that he was holding it in his ...”

“... on the RER. ‘A supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall,’ she says. (She returns to the supermarket: Regarde les lumières, mon amour, not yet translated, is a journal of her trips to Auchan between 2012 and 2013, picking up a thread that began when she was a 19-year-old au pair in 1960 and would walk around ...”

“... according to the degree of factuality being claimed or implied. A small mistake of fact in Wolf Hall would be more damaging than wall-to-wall solecisms in a piece of work like Ford Madox Ford’s Fifth Queen trilogy, where the approach is impressionistic. The same distinction carries over into modernist novels that are no less historical fictions because ...”

“... letter to Norton: ‘The country is gloomy, anxious, and London reflects its gloom. Westminster Hall and the Tower were half blown up two days ago by Irish Dynamiters.’Eighteen months earlier, a young Irishman recently returned from America, Thomas J. Clarke, one of O’Donovan Rossa’s Sancho Panzas, had been arrested in London. Using evidence of an ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... Hellman accepts the offer. All then is giddy alacrity. Like Jane Eyre setting off for Thornfield Hall, or the excitable governess departing for Bly at the opening of The Turn of the Screw, Mahoney promptly leaves her parents’ house in dreary Milton, Massachusetts, and heads for the sun-dappled Vineyard, revelling in fantasies about the marvellous ...”

“... third Of the Nationalist vole (in Belfast it got more votes than any other party in the last City Hall elections). By the mid-Eighties Sinn Fein had become the kind of political party Adams had long dreamed of creating. Reviewing the Party’s electoral successes, many IRA volunteers began for the first time to take Sinn Fein seriously. Undoubtedly, some saw ...”