“... on all charges. Ascribing their politics to ‘a warped understanding of sociology’, Mr Justice James sentenced the four to ten years’ imprisonment, reducing Prescott’s 15-year sentence to match. By this stage, supporters were going round London with badges proclaiming ‘I am a member of the Angry Brigade,’ and Time Out was running as front-page ...”

“... Carrie Kipling, once arrived at their house in Sussex to find Rudyard in a sweat in front of the hall fireplace shovelling a pile of his manuscripts into the flames. It was a horrifying sight, especially to a publisher. ‘For heaven’s sake, Rud, what are you doing?’ Doubleday asked. To which the answer came: ‘I was looking over old papers and I got ...”

“... a bang, but the rest knew nothing until, about twenty minutes later, Mr Kebede appeared in the hall in his stockinged feet, saying there was a fire in his flat. He thought it had started at the back of his fridge. He called the police before going to the door of his next-door neighbour, Maryam Adam, who was three months pregnant. ‘It was exactly 12.50 ...”

“... what he has accomplished. 24 February. To a Faber meeting for their sales reps at the Butchers’ Hall, which is just by the back door of Barts, bombed presumably and rebuilt in undistinguished neo-Georgian some time in the 1960s. Doorman sullen and no advertisement for the supposed cheerfulness of the butchering profession. Early so have a chance to look at ...”

“... John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already arrived. It was there for all to see in the Germany of the Weimar republic: glass and ...”

“... London Fields in Hackney, to Charles Saatchi’s oak-panelled chamber in the decommissioned County Hall, right alongside the Thames. The Wilson tank, like the one into which I was about to plunge, was a concept pool, around which visitors moved like catwalk models and talked in whispers. There was the unspoken threat of ritual baptism into some dark sect, for ...”

“... Greeting’s’. When the bag company refused to replace them staffers at the Town Hall spent hours pasting little pieces of adhesive tape over every offending apostrophe. My contradictory husband, who is sometimes known in his field as Write-it-Wrong Elbow, liberated a few of the apostrophes by pulling off the adhesive tape. 13 January. The ...”

“... 1990s. There is a pink babygro with the slogan ‘I’m a full-time job’ on sale in the entrance hall and Selma James, the feminist writer and activist who helped found the ECP, is being trailed around the building by an old white sheepdog and a young black Labrador. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel about ...”

“... volume, and in that time began spoiling the new poems (in proof) as hard as he could. ‘Locksley Hall’ is shorn of two or three couplets. I will copy out from the book of somebody who luckily transcribed from the proof-sheet – meantime one line, you will see, I have restored – see and wonder! I have been with Moxon this morning, who tells me that he is ...”

“... a worldwide celebrity, ranked as a thinker alongside Plato, Socrates, Descartes and Kant. William James thought Bergson’s work had wrought a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Lord Balfour read him with great care and attention; Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to write an article on his work. People climbed ladders merely to catch a glimpse of the great ...”

“... history, and the grandson of an industrial chemist, he boarded at a choir school, went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and married a future Anglican clergywoman who wrote a PhD on Izaak Walton’s ecclesiastical Lives. Still, it’s misleading to speak of love letters to quiet men in pullovers, because characters, though deftly sketched, aren’t always the prime ...”

“... Theatre, where the classics were translated into Scouse, seedbed of poetry and stronghold of music hall as well as of the high culture of the Walker Gallery and the orchestras. Arthur Ballard, one of Lennon’s teachers at the art school, has rightly said that it took twenty years’ work to create the culture which produced John Lennon. A deeper study of this ...”

“... profuse details on the social mores of the ‘noble Houses of the Forest, Bliss Castle & Darwin Hall’ (nicknames for the Owen, Wedgwood and Darwin estates), allowing precise assessments of his attitude towards the Church, politics and nature. From such material must come new social reconstructions of Darwinism. The want of a definitive correspondence has ...”

“... has taken over twenty years, or to know how very badly Norman Mailer behaved in New York Town Hall in 1972. Alternatively, the writer can take herself as the subject of the collection, and its various parts as the items of a life history. There are various ways of doing this. A young and naive writer will prune and polish the material itself, as did the ...”

“... challenged by a Danish coastguard, who remarks on Beowulf’s formidable appearance: ‘That is no hall-man, wæpnum geweorþad [made worthy by weapons].’ This tells us, first, that people in the heroic world were aware of men who looked like warriors and weren’t – they only had the gear – but also, more relevantly for the Staffordshire Hoard, that the ...”