“... in Paradise after A Manual for Cleaning Women is to experience Berlin as a romanesco, or the hall of mirrors scene in The Lady from Shanghai. She approaches the same material in so many different ways, in so many different stories, that you see the art in action. (Not always the art, sometimes the workshop. Sometimes it reads as fiddling or coyness.) Try ...”

“... mostly wind farm or vineyard. At the outer tip of the peninsula, the seventh-century chapel of St-Peter-on-the-Wall, built on the site of a Roman fort, has for company the austere concrete box of a decommissioned power station. The ancient oak trees at Mundon Hall were already beginning to die when Warner first saw ...”

“... could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again’. ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused ...”

“... its founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, were the first couple to get married when City Hall opened to same-sex weddings in 2004; and while the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City are justly famous, drag queens in San Francisco had demonstrated against police oppression three years earlier in the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, and a number of cabaret ...”

“... that the New Party had been responsible for their defeat, shouted for vengeance outside the Town Hall, Mosley turned to John Strachey: ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the crowd that has prevented anyone doing anything in England since the war.’ The fascist bully boys who would deal with crowds like that were already insight. A few months later, Mosley was ...”

“... Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries – Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an impotent ombudsman – had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier ...”

“... American literary scene in all its brash bravura and high stakes providing a Radio City Music Hall backdrop for even celebrity-averse writers such as Roth to achieve stardom. That Roth made it a lasting stardom is a testament to a relentless work ethic and a bottomless faith in the value and vocation of literature; he didn’t try to smooth down the ...”

“... in a line of Viscount Ridleys called Matthew, has his main home at the family seat of Blagdon Hall, halfway between Blyth and Newcastle Airport. Blyth’s main park is called Ridley Park. Ian Levy, who won Blyth for Johnson’s Tories, comes from a family of farmers who are Ridley tenants. In the 18th century, when they had been prominent local oligarchs ...”

“... withdrew from public life and devoted himself to charity. He went to offer his services to Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. He started off by washing dishes and ended up running the organisation, a selfless administrator and tireless fundraiser. His obituary in the Daily Telegraph in 2006 announced: ‘No one in public life ever did more to atone for ...”

“... that little had changed. (The book was published in Spanish in 1981; the English translation by Peter Bush comes out this summer.) As a landlord and his guests languorously discuss peasants and their lack of culture, he boasts that there are no illiterates among his tenants, and to prove it he invites some of them to the dining room to display their ...”

“... played the Allegro Cantabile from Hermann’s Cello Concerto at Kennedy’s book launch in Wigmore Hall, where Hermann himself had played almost a century before. Corrie, who was at the event, said: ‘The cello being played [here] now makes the circle round.’ Five months later she told her father’s story at the European Parliament, where again Lucas ...”

“... centre. At the 20th Party Congress that year, Hu himself was unceremoniously escorted from the hall before the show of hands approving the new Politburo.Xi has protected his rule through repeated purges. He succeeded Hu in 2012 after the fall of Bo Xilai, then the party boss in Chongqing and a putative rival. Bo was arrested by the party disciplinary ...”

“... surprised to find that this was one of the points Hans was to make in his 75th-birthday tribute to Peter Pears, published in 1985. His salute opened with one of those magisterial rebukes, ‘Every musician knows that normally singers are amongst the most unmusicianly, if not indeed unmusical, members of our profession,’ but went on to praise Pears (as ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the bosom. How would she not make anyone nervous? Peter Bradshaw has written that Taylor and Clift ‘are almost like reflections of each other; when they kiss, something incestuous and thrillingly forbidden throbs out of the screen.’ Charlie Chaplin told Stevens it was ‘the greatest film ever made about ...”