“... an important but unreliable source.) ‘That is not played, but stabbed,’ the old man told one young woman. ‘If you have no ears to hear, then why are you playing the piano?’ Maybe Liszt couldn’t take the devotion. Or maybe it was the booze. What matters most for Walker is really very simple. Liszt was a musical hero. (‘No great composer has ever ...”

“... If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English … If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog … But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real ...”

“... from counter-jihadist websites, 2083 was posted online on the day of the attacks under the name ‘Andrew Berwick’, one of Breivik’s several aliases. The signs of Europe’s creeping Islamisation were everywhere, he argued, from Bosnian independence to the spread of mosques in Oslo. Muslim men were having their way with European women, while declaring ...”

“... and the libel laws to avoid prosecution, and Waugh felt the press had been craven. In 1977 Andrew Newton, the comically incompetent hit man who had missed Scott but killed his dog, Rinka, was released from prison and started hawking his story round the papers. Thorpe, as anxious to deny his homosexuality as the charge of attempted murder, set out to ...”

“... itself seeing eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago’.In America, he met the young journalist Hope Hale. Like all the women Cockburn was involved with, she was hotly radical and stubbornly self-reliant. They had to be: he moved with ease from job to job and woman to woman. According to Patrick Cockburn, Hale was fascinated ‘by Claud’s ...”

“... which was manifest not just in his life and letters but in his poems too. ‘Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs/About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green’: no modern poet has written with a more intent exuberance about what he called ‘the twice told fields of infancy’. The intoxication of this condition comes from ...”

“... showed some years ago, Shakespeare had links with a brewer of that name during his sojourn near St Andrew by the Wardrobe. Doubtless the Oxford editors felt that a single unfamiliar poem was as much as the public would swallow at once, but sagacious readers will instantly agree that the proximity of another plausibly Shakespearean poem surviving only from ...”

“... British. In 1947 the Colonial Office, at the instigation of the head of the African division, Andrew Cohen, changed its mind about the proper way of dealing with nationalists and momentously decided that in the spirit of enlightened self-interest it was best to enlist their co-operation in various aspects of administration. The men-on-the-spot were never ...”

“... surprisingly long time, but when scandal finally came in 1996 – a currency trader called Robert Young, working in cahoots with Cantrade Bank, a Jersey subsidiary of the Swiss banking giant UBS, defrauded investors of $26 million – the Wall Street Journal concluded that Jersey was an offshore hazard ‘living off lax regulation and political ...”

“... when faced with endless aisles crammed with heavily decorated household goods and furnishings. The young William Morris found everything ‘wonderfully ugly’. Ralph Wornum, a future keeper of the National Gallery, said: ‘the paramount impression conveyed to the critical mind must be a general want of education in taste.’ Auerbach comments: ‘There was ...”

“... Gorbals Diehards took on the Bolsheviks in Huntingtower, crackhead gangs are fighting it out. Andrew O’Hagan’s threnody for Scots socialism, Our Fathers, has Hugh Bawn making his way to his dying grandfather’s Ayrshire flat through a mob of giggling, doped kids. O’Hagan himself has talked of the more general problem of reaching the chemical ...”

“... edition of the poems and then in Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993). In Larkin’s best poems ‘minginess of spirit’ – J.M. Coetzee’s phrase from another context – is either played for laughs or set against the poet’s ‘sun-comprehending’ side. In the life ...”

“... which more in a moment) was that they ‘did not know how to hate’. ‘I love him,’ he said of Andrew Bonar Law, almost the only politician he had any time for, ‘because he hates.’ The objects of his hatred were many: Liberals, socialists, Irish Home Rulers, the Irish Free State (the ‘Free State of Evil’), possibly the Irish themselves (‘the ...”

“... alter the party beyond recognition, assisted by social-media-savvy but politically inexperienced young people (plus a smattering of old Trots). Labour’s political identity and its inheritance of practical knowledge, both the product of long, often bitter experience over more than a century, are consequently seen to be under grave threat. The same facts ...”

“... Spanish friend Lucius Cornelius Balbus put up a theatre and a shopping portico in 19 bc: the still young branch of the Museo Nazionale that now occupies the site is unique in devoting most of its attention to the early medieval development of Rome, when the grandeur of Balbus’ days was long gone. Because it tries to musealise generations of Roman history ...”