“... down the trumpet ‘just like you’re spitting paper pellets at the school bully’. One morning, Richard Lloyd, the cathedral organist, a man who like my father never got angry, auditioned me at his grand piano and offered me a place in the cathedral choir. I was ten years old. Despite the name, most of the boys at the Chorister School weren’t ...”

“... the elementary school where my education began, stopping on occasion just over the playground wall.There were several variables in this stopping and the spectacle it sometimes provided. The cart had to halt at the top of Christ Church View where we could all see it and this had to happen during the morning or the dinner-time break when all the school ...”

“... and open-plan living quarters. Once more, as in Princeton, Mann’s study was set apart, with a wall of books, and smaller windows. The corridor outside it had a separate staircase to the upper floor. In both his American houses, there was a sense of the study as a shadowy place, away from the opulent living quarters, mirroring the distinction between Mann ...”

“... in 1945, which gives a providential glimpse of Ethiopia’s ambitions and the writing on the wall for the Eritreans – or some of the writing anyhow. At the time of the Congress, the British were still running Eritrea, the world war was over and decolonisation was the next great step for Europe and its subject peoples. The portrait of Kenyatta perfectly ...”

“... tried to cheer him up with an outing to Stratford, where Tennyson scribbled his name on the wall of Shakespeare’s house and seemed to enjoy his trip on the new railway. By the spring of the following year, though, his restless misery had returned, leaving FitzGerald anxious enough to track him down in his dubious London lodgings, finding him in ...”

“... to prevent the abuse of prisoners, but Akam reports that the divisional commander, General Peter Wall, refused to give this order to the forces under his command. He was later promoted to chief of the general staff.British behaviour in Basra inspired widespread hatred. Officers deceived themselves by talking of their good works, such as repainting schools ...”

“... Lord Cavendish, irritated by passers-by throwing oyster shells and other rubbish over his garden wall at Burlington House, blocked it off on the west side by building the Burlington Arcade – then, as now, the longest arcade in Britain. Despite all the accidental and deliberate destruction of the last two hundred years, the history of the West End is still ...”

“... pandemic, when it was spotted in the masthead ad slots on the homepages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, normally prime real estate for online advertising.A plausible rough estimate is that UK news publishers lost £50 million in the early months of the pandemic because of ad-blocking of their stories about it; in April 2020 the culture ...”

“... environment. The exhibition concludes with a mural consisting of large circular patterns which Richard Long has painted with his own fingers out of mud from the River Avon. Long belongs to the movement of the Sixties away from museums and galleries, and much of his work – footsteps and arrangements of stones or driftwood in various remote locations ...”

“... In the course of the agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law ...”

“... sentiments began to seep into the American public sphere no sooner than the rubble of the Berlin Wall had been tidied away.In hindsight, four figures in particular stand out: Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard and Ross Perot. Francis was, and remains, a comparatively obscure figure in American conservative intellectual and journalistic circles. But ...”

“... printer engines for Chinese characters, through all the ups and downs (colleagues being poached by Wall Street firms, interdepartmental rivalries, power failures in Beijing), to the Kasparov/IBM showdown. A particular low point was a Spectator article claiming that the computer chess project was a front sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects ...”

“... did not join? How different were their expectations and attitudes? Until the fall of the Berlin Wall these questions were asked and answered chiefly by impassioned anti-Communists, many of them breast-beating former devotees of the God That Failed. With some notable exceptions – Annie Kriegel was one – they wrote works of condemnation, warning and fear ...”

“... or self-abasement, and if you didn’t answer the bloody phone she would just ring it off the wall. Harry’s voice was not big, not powerful, but she taught herself to use it with tremendous precision: Chapman hadn’t realised, he said, that she’d planned to do a little-girl lullaby number on ‘Heart of Glass’. A voice like that, in the ...”

“... ever have those dreams that are just completely real?’ In the opening scene of Slacker (1990), Richard Linklater, who also directs the film, plays a version of himself, peppering his monologue on the nature of reality with references to Tolstoy, Frank Zappa and The Wizard of Oz. The movie takes place over a single day in Austin and follows a string of ...”