“... and do the same in turn. The events, as they remember them, will chafe against one another. The white satin and little gold pins of Stephanie in The Virgin in the Garden (1978), frightened, unhappy, knowing she is leaving the life of the mind behind, yet compelled by the dense matter of Daniel’s body; the chilling image of the bride in A Summer ...”

“... powerboat racing career. He entered the 1963 Daily Express race in his top of the range boat The White Migrant and his schoolfriend, who was at Lord’s for the day, recalls the story unfolding in headlines in the Evening Standard. At lunchtime it was ‘Surprise Leader in Powerboat Race’; by close of play it was ‘Powerboat Sinks’. ‘Well,’ his ...”

“... one. A story, probably apocryphal, relates that when he returned from his voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus was ridiculed by members of the Spanish court: any fool, they said, could have accomplished what he had been so richly rewarded for doing. In reply Columbus challenged them to make an egg stand upright. The greybeard nobles tried and ...”

“... team regularly plays, and plays very traditionally with no lurid lycra kit but in immaculate white flannels and caps. The players seem to be largely taxi drivers, their cabs parked on the road or, as today, by the actual field. With no interest in cricket we’re both of us cheered by this old-fashioned spectacle and the players who go to the trouble to ...”

“... of J.H. Plumb, the cosmopolitan allusiveness of E.J. Hobsbawm, and the impassioned radicalism of Christopher Hill. Some have criticised his work for being too bland, for lacking analytical bite, for being more concerned with experience than with explanation, for relying too much on frequently-recycled quotations, and for the way in which one book is so often ...”

“... was formerly the greatest coal town in the country. Now the country is ploughland, interspersed by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is ...”

“... into the sea, and can usually be induced to leave long before this becomes a possibility; the white population of Zimbabwe has fallen by 70 per cent since the end of minority rule, without having experienced anything more than sporadic intimidation. Were what has long been hailed as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to become the site of ...”

“... question here. Why should Archer, normally so bumptious about his Struggle from Log Cabin to White House, miss out so much of the log-cabin experience? A clue may lie in the curriculum vitae which Archer submitted to Cobb in 1961, and was later obtained by Levy of the Mail to help him with his ‘background’ piece during Archer’s libel action (Daily ...”

“... made of the Quatuor – a fact which oddly passes without comment in the useful discography by Christopher Dingle that concludes Hill’s book. The Germans were not unsympathetic to these musical endeavours. The camp commander supplied Messiaen with manuscript paper, and found a cello, with one string missing, for Pasquier. A German officer gave Messiaen ...”

“... A spirit storming in blank walls, A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white, Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun. My passenger pigeon poem acknowledges that the information it contains has been gleaned from the internet, but it also deploys the Sterne/Burton defence by taking in some allusions, including the ‘opulent ...”

“... give space to Ross. She was the model for Sally Bowles, the unpolitical fuckwit at the centre of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood had shared a flat with her. But in his novel ‘he created an ineradicable image of Jean that obscured the reality,’ an image that survived for decades into plays and films (I Am a Camera and Liza ...”

“... the sociologists Claus Offe and Wolfgang Streeck (Germany); the political scientists Christopher Bickerton (Britain), Morten Rasmussen (Denmark) and Antoine Vauchez (France); the historians Kiran Klaus Patel (Germany) and Vera Fritz (Luxembourg). In the work of these and other scholars, the dynamics of European integration emerge in a ...”

“... hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to ...”

“... where his artisan father practised his trade as a glover and ‘whittawer’ – a worker of white leather, typically kidskin, and thus a producer of those ‘kid gloves’ still proverbial for their softness. The product was upmarket but the production of it messy and pungent. When Shakespeare mentions a man with a ‘great round beard, like a ...”

“... blur, a rush and press of business, in which what feels like a temporary, fixable expediency, a white lie, over time and in retrospect calcifies into a mistake that can’t be undone, a life-defining crime. We never get to know that, because these people are self-selectingly the kind of people who won’t tell us the truth. In the case of Wirecard, my hunch ...”