“... is embedded as a deep structure across much of his work. There’s a disreputable old music hall doggerel that comes to mind here: ‘You know my cousin Maby?/You mustn’t tell a soul/She had a wooden baby/You see – she was married to a Pole.’ In the world of Coetzee’s fiction, all women are ineluctably married to a pole, being under no illusion ...”

“... Hopkinson (of Picture Post), Tom Harrisson (of Mass Observation), Alastair Forbes and Stephen King-Hall, some of whom became Observer contributors when Astor took charge. But that was years away. In the meantime he started to work for Louis Mountbatten in Combined Operations during the week and for the family newspaper in the evenings and at weekends. Garvin ...”

“... it leaves open whether it is Zoe’s own passivity or the heedless passers-by who are to blame.Peter, a young painter, turns up at her house. ‘For a moment she could not remember him. “The coffee bar,” he said. “You gave me your address. I promised to take you out, one afternoon in summer.”’ Zoe doesn’t remember, but goes with him to a ...”

“... that the New Party had been responsible for their defeat, shouted for vengeance outside the Town Hall, Mosley turned to John Strachey: ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the crowd that has prevented anyone doing anything in England since the war.’ The fascist bully boys who would deal with crowds like that were already insight. A few months later, Mosley was ...”

“... mostly wind farm or vineyard. At the outer tip of the peninsula, the seventh-century chapel of St-Peter-on-the-Wall, built on the site of a Roman fort, has for company the austere concrete box of a decommissioned power station. The ancient oak trees at Mundon Hall were already beginning to die when Warner first saw ...”

“... Worms (1999) looks at the way Freud’s death is narrated in biographies by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay. There are plenty of differences, but both biographers need to see Freud as ‘the master of self-mastery’. Jones in particular, flying in the face of all the psychoanalytic evidence, presents him as ‘a remarkably consistent, heroically unified ...”

“... could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again’. ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused ...”

“... in Paradise after A Manual for Cleaning Women is to experience Berlin as a romanesco, or the hall of mirrors scene in The Lady from Shanghai. She approaches the same material in so many different ways, in so many different stories, that you see the art in action. (Not always the art, sometimes the workshop. Sometimes it reads as fiddling or coyness.) Try ...”

“... its founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, were the first couple to get married when City Hall opened to same-sex weddings in 2004; and while the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City are justly famous, drag queens in San Francisco had demonstrated against police oppression three years earlier in the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, and a number of cabaret ...”

“... Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries – Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an impotent ombudsman – had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier ...”

“... American literary scene in all its brash bravura and high stakes providing a Radio City Music Hall backdrop for even celebrity-averse writers such as Roth to achieve stardom. That Roth made it a lasting stardom is a testament to a relentless work ethic and a bottomless faith in the value and vocation of literature; he didn’t try to smooth down the ...”

“... in a line of Viscount Ridleys called Matthew, has his main home at the family seat of Blagdon Hall, halfway between Blyth and Newcastle Airport. Blyth’s main park is called Ridley Park. Ian Levy, who won Blyth for Johnson’s Tories, comes from a family of farmers who are Ridley tenants. In the 18th century, when they had been prominent local oligarchs ...”

“... surprised to find that this was one of the points Hans was to make in his 75th-birthday tribute to Peter Pears, published in 1985. His salute opened with one of those magisterial rebukes, ‘Every musician knows that normally singers are amongst the most unmusicianly, if not indeed unmusical, members of our profession,’ but went on to praise Pears (as ...”

“... withdrew from public life and devoted himself to charity. He went to offer his services to Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. He started off by washing dishes and ended up running the organisation, a selfless administrator and tireless fundraiser. His obituary in the Daily Telegraph in 2006 announced: ‘No one in public life ever did more to atone for ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”