“... bright, confident style, Coward irresistibly combined reserve and high camp. He became the merry-andrew of moderation, warning mothers to keep their daughters off the stage, confiding, in Present Laughter (1942), that sex was ‘vastly overrated’ and wickedly pleading: ‘don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans.’ Coward was a performer who wrote: not a ...”

“... his own magazine and sought out the Eye’s founders – Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams and Andrew Osmond – and bought the magazine from Osmond for £1500. This was a substantial, though not an enormous investment. Within a year or so, he moved the Eye offices into the Establishment Club and then next door. At that time, the Eye consisted entirely of ...”

“... knew a thing or two about lachrymose tat, dismissed Wilson’s book as a ‘syrupy dish for young sentimentalists’. Wilson had the review suppressed and a puff inserted in its place. What is most remarkable about Wilson’s literary output is that he produced his vast and varied body of work while holding down the most prestigious humanities ...”

“... Munro’s telling of the past changes mode from something like an essay to story: The first time Andrew was ever in Edinburgh he was ten years old. With his father and some other men he climbed a slippery black street. It was raining, the city smell of smoke filled the air, and the half doors were open, showing the firelit insides of the taverns which he ...”

“... the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize ...”

“... the Oppenheimers moved to San Francisco (the family name was changed about ten years later). As a young adult, Oppen came under pressure from his father to succeed in business and reacted by taking his distance. In 1928, while hitch-hiking around the country with Mary Colby, whom he married in Dallas, he bought a little sailing boat; they took it from Detroit ...”

“... miners during their year-long strike and organising socialist festivals in the town (attended by a young Starmer in 1987 and 1988). But his power had ebbed.As Benn’s stock fell, Ken Livingstone’s was rising. He took control of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981 after a thrilling bit of political manoeuvring, with the ambition of using his tenure at ...”

“... while Second Street itself saw better days some time ago. The Borden house – see ‘Andrew J. Borden’ in flowing script on the brass plate next to the door – stands by itself with a few scant feet of yard on either side. On the left is a stable, out of use since he sold the horse. In the back lot grow a few pear trees, laden at this ...”

“... in a slightly different pattern the o sounds in windows/open/south in the second line. The two young women are shadows now, but in saying so Yeats brings back his earlier line which blazed its light behind their silky young bodies. Then in the very last line of the poem – ‘Bid me strike a match and blow’ – he ...”

“... business. His sisters were no ordinary country girls. The family’s guardian and relative Andrew Cusack, a draper in the town, arranged for them to be sent as boarders up to Dublin to be educated in Padraig Pearse’s experimental school, St Ita’s. This was an extraordinary decision for any family in Ireland at that time, even more so for one from ...”

“... he met another recent graduate, Douglas Carswell, and convinced him to join the cause. The three young men – born in 1970 or 1971 – had certain similarities in their personal histories. Hannan and Carswell spent their childhoods in faraway, politically disturbed countries as the children of British expatriates: Hannan’s family had a poultry farm in ...”

“... that their love had been allowed to blossom. Brown is forgivably sceptical: ‘Had this impetuous young woman really managed to hide her feelings for a full five and a half years? And had the group captain somehow exercised a similar restraint?’In a footnote, Brown adds a recollection from the princess’s chauffeur, John Larkin, who asked her whether she ...”

“... jazz/blues record – Bessie Smith’s classic ‘St Louis Blues’ from 1925, which featured a young Louis Armstrong playing cornet.This collision of models meant that Tippett’s music tended to develop through rupture and disjoint: the idea of combining disparate strands to form a neatly arranged whole never appealed to him. The English musical ...”

“... with: ‘both father and son were successful, self-made businessmen.’ Whether​ as a budding young entrepreneur or an aspiring young actor – or quite possibly a mix of the two – Shakespeare’s move to London was a key event in his life. We have no precise date for this; it’s perhaps unnecessary to think of it as ...”

“... drama narrated in the Sonnets and involving two personalities as well as the poet’s: the ‘fair young man’ and the ‘dark lady’. For a very long time – this approach still dominates at least the more conservative or biographical criticism – the Sonnets have been read as telling some kind of love story, the objects a man and a woman (Sonnets ...”