“... what he has accomplished. 24 February. To a Faber meeting for their sales reps at the Butchers’ Hall, which is just by the back door of Barts, bombed presumably and rebuilt in undistinguished neo-Georgian some time in the 1960s. Doorman sullen and no advertisement for the supposed cheerfulness of the butchering profession. Early so have a chance to look at ...”

“... John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already arrived. It was there for all to see in the Germany of the Weimar republic: glass and ...”

“... London Fields in Hackney, to Charles Saatchi’s oak-panelled chamber in the decommissioned County Hall, right alongside the Thames. The Wilson tank, like the one into which I was about to plunge, was a concept pool, around which visitors moved like catwalk models and talked in whispers. There was the unspoken threat of ritual baptism into some dark sect, for ...”

“... Greeting’s’. When the bag company refused to replace them staffers at the Town Hall spent hours pasting little pieces of adhesive tape over every offending apostrophe. My contradictory husband, who is sometimes known in his field as Write-it-Wrong Elbow, liberated a few of the apostrophes by pulling off the adhesive tape. 13 January. The ...”

“... volume, and in that time began spoiling the new poems (in proof) as hard as he could. ‘Locksley Hall’ is shorn of two or three couplets. I will copy out from the book of somebody who luckily transcribed from the proof-sheet – meantime one line, you will see, I have restored – see and wonder! I have been with Moxon this morning, who tells me that he is ...”

“... 1990s. There is a pink babygro with the slogan ‘I’m a full-time job’ on sale in the entrance hall and Selma James, the feminist writer and activist who helped found the ECP, is being trailed around the building by an old white sheepdog and a young black Labrador. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel about ...”

“... has taken over twenty years, or to know how very badly Norman Mailer behaved in New York Town Hall in 1972. Alternatively, the writer can take herself as the subject of the collection, and its various parts as the items of a life history. There are various ways of doing this. A young and naive writer will prune and polish the material itself, as did the ...”

“... critic who had written an insufficiently respectful review of a black swing concert at Carnegie Hall.) Even Ellington, who showed no fondness of the white party-liners – there was notorious friction between him and Hammond – supported various red-tinged causes so frequently that he attracted the attention of the FBI, a fact noted by Stowe, who has ...”

“... for a decade. She develops her career as a pianist. Devotes herself to her child. Learns to love James, her not altogether thrilling husband. And when she discovers she is going deaf, she meets this intense misfortune with dignity and a proportionate distress. It’s at the point where her deafness is beginning seriously to disrupt her life that Julia meets ...”

“... Theatre, where the classics were translated into Scouse, seedbed of poetry and stronghold of music hall as well as of the high culture of the Walker Gallery and the orchestras. Arthur Ballard, one of Lennon’s teachers at the art school, has rightly said that it took twenty years’ work to create the culture which produced John Lennon. A deeper study of this ...”

“... profuse details on the social mores of the ‘noble Houses of the Forest, Bliss Castle & Darwin Hall’ (nicknames for the Owen, Wedgwood and Darwin estates), allowing precise assessments of his attitude towards the Church, politics and nature. From such material must come new social reconstructions of Darwinism. The want of a definitive correspondence has ...”

“... to advise in a junta. It was quite another for them spontaneously to raise doubts in the lecture hall. But Charles’s edict recalling existing papers and forbidding further discussion was a dead letter. The arguments went on. The Crown agreed to abolish the encomienda in 1545. Las Casas and others started to refuse absolution to some ...”

“... challenged by a Danish coastguard, who remarks on Beowulf’s formidable appearance: ‘That is no hall-man, wæpnum geweorþad [made worthy by weapons].’ This tells us, first, that people in the heroic world were aware of men who looked like warriors and weren’t – they only had the gear – but also, more relevantly for the Staffordshire Hoard, that the ...”

“... a worldwide celebrity, ranked as a thinker alongside Plato, Socrates, Descartes and Kant. William James thought Bergson’s work had wrought a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Lord Balfour read him with great care and attention; Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to write an article on his work. People climbed ladders merely to catch a glimpse of the great ...”

“... On a February morning in 1788, dozens of spectators filed into the gallery of Westminster Hall. Among them appeared the cream of London society, headed by Queen Charlotte herself, elegant in fawn-coloured satin and a modest splash of diamonds, and flanked by three of her daughters. With three hundred guards keeping the passages clear, the peers of the realm marched in according to rank ...”