“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on how to behave improperly, according to the new times and mores. That dama must even bed a young becado (a grantee of the Revolution) and let her ‘thighs enact the struggle of the contraries’. Reid has an elegant phrase to sum up this battle of the sexes that begins and ends in a clash of classes: ‘Take a scholar to bed.’ Turning the becado ...”

“... years before Todd published his thoughts on Charlie. It was unceremoniously buried in 2004, when young Muslim women were forbidden to cover their heads in schools. Since the Charlie Hebdo murders, it has become the bad object festering at the back of national consciousness, just as secularism remains the sacred object in the foreground. Todd describes ...”

“... the diaspora has cultivated a harmless minority identity through Burns Clubs and mutual-help St Andrew Societies. Only in the last 30 years has there been an upsurge of enthusiasm for ‘Scottish heritage’, a spreading craze in North America and Europe which is all about kilts, Highland Games and gruesome invented ceremonies like ‘The Kirkin’ o’ the ...”

“... of fancy women holding whips or with their noses in the air. Unworldly Yeshiva boys and alarmed young Hassids encounter pairs of haughty women (shikses, surely) in shiny high heels, and gaze on them longingly or avert their gaze unconvincingly. ‘The shoe provides a locus for Schulz’s fascination with traditional Jud-aism and fetishistic ...”