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“... The result is an uncommonly impressive group of industrial buildings, and a prime example of what J.M. Richards of the Architectural Review called ‘the functional tradition’ … The works closed in 1965 and the large malthouse was converted to a Concert Hall for the Aldeburgh festival by Derek Sugden of Arup Associates, 1966-67. As a conversion it was a ...”

“... bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took a break from a four-day conference on crime control to address reporters. His subject was the spell that outlaw behaviour had apparently cast on the youth of America. In a characteristically sideways rhetorical manoeuvre, he began with a ...”

“... a swansong of passivity in the drawing-room; and, above all, the opera libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Arabella. These, I would say, constitute half a safety-net, half a ball and chain, meaning that Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) won’t ever go away. All the same, when ...”

“... a 1970s TV comedy star, and there’s a life-size cardboard cut-out of him in the barn; in Spring, Richard makes TV documentaries; and the slow-dreaming, 104-year-old Daniel Gluck (whom we first met in Autumn and who returns in Summer – a man for all seasons) awakes from his reveries and returns to the present when he hears a song he wrote playing on the TV ...”

“... golden fount of his honeyed tongue.’ Godfrey of St Victor, too, wrote a poem about his teacher, Richard, describing himself lying on the ground and clinging to his master’s feet: ‘Such teachings resound from his mouth!/They ravish me – or rather restore me to myself.’ It’s a remarkable reaction to instruction – especially since, as Newman points ...”

“... the logician Howard Pospesel at the University of Miami, where he read Frege, Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, but abandoned postgraduate study after deciding that fiction offered a more fruitful way of thinking about how ‘meaning gets constructed’. ‘I start with something that bugs me, some philosophical problem,’ he has said, ‘and then I look for ...”

“... one by the name of Crippen died during the month of March’. The story then begins to resemble Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders. These retired thespians wouldn’t let the matter rest. The Nashes went to Albion House to ask Crippen more questions. When he couldn’t produce the name of the crematorium to which Belle’s body had been consigned – or a ...”

“... found in the pages of a book. Listen to this, for instance, from III Henry VI, a very early play. Richard, Duke of York has fatally lost a battle: … all my followers to the eager foe Turn back and fly, like ships before the wind, Or lambs pursu’d by hunger-starved wolves. His sons rally to him, and they counter-attack: With this we charg’d again; as ...”

“... year his blind daughter, Mary, was born – and suffered from a series of nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my ...”

“... as an unusually bold writer in the Nation pointed out, ‘one more courtier straining to get the king’s ear’. But the Bush administration didn’t need eggheads to euphemise pre-emptive war, torture, rendition and indefinite offshore detention. Bush’s own demotic – ‘We’ll smoke them out,’ ‘wanted dead or alive’, ‘Pretty soon, we’ll have ...”

“... William Sancroft, who acceded to her request for charity and put her in touch with the publisher Richard Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the ...”

“... crops up in the dedicatory verses, comparing the mission of Agee and Evans to that of Edgar in King Lear: ‘Edgar, weeping for pity, to the shelf of that sick bluff,/Bring your blind father, and describe a little.’ But they are not much like Edgar, not on the scene to show and expound suffering to the sufferers; and one of Agee’s truest points will be ...”

“... relentless. To Beddoes’s friends, it seemed that Stock was burying him all over again. Dr John King, the other, more popular assistant at the Hotwells institution, described Stock as a ‘literary undertaker’; Robert Southey told Coleridge, who told Beddoes’s protégé Humphry Davy, that ‘the proper vignette for the work would be a funeral lamp ...”

“... mix. Conrad’s favourite writer, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, the Scottish laird – the real king of Scotland, some say – spent several years in San Antonio, attempting to become a cattle baron, going broke, and then, out of desperation, beginning his writing career with an account of a hanging in Cotulla for the San Antonio Express. Stephen Crane ...”

“... Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.Under cover of night, my brothers and I crept around town perpetrating ...”