“... tale’s crackpot complexity.’ In other words, the age of the bestseller had arrived. If we jump forward a few years, to 2 September 1914, we encounter another tableau of literary life that is, in its way, no less striking than our Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had ...”

“... the aftermath, when the workforce decided to stay on strike – one was shot, the other forced to jump off a bridge, or some say a wall – but no one much remembers them. The mid-century revolutions in Europe were part of our history syllabus at school: we were learning about them around the time May ’68 kicked off. I was a 15-year-old with no political ...”

“... of exposition. The lawyer Coen needs legal and financial documentation from the genteel sisters Anne and Julia Bast in order to administer the estate of their brother Thomas, who died intestate. The sisters’ grip on relevance in conversation, and indeed reality, is far from fierce, but a family and a business are sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called ...”

“... travelling into Manhattan to see plays in the $1.89 seats on Broadway, starting with The Diary of Anne Frank in 1956. ‘I remember thinking … Why couldn’t I play the part? I felt I could do it just as well as Susan Strasberg.’ Her talent, especially at the beginning, was a product of her ambition rather than the other way around; when she played a ...”

“... Perhaps sensing such difficulties, an American sympathiser, the Spectator’s former deputy editor Anne Applebaum, now of the Standard, has tacitly upgraded Poland to full Occidental status, entitling her – unfailingly disobliging – inspection of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine in Between East and West.* Another way out of them is offered by Miklos ...”

“... it was made, Nightcleaners has mostly been remembered for its rebarbatively avant-garde form: jump cuts, long breaks of blackness, harsh juxtapositions of sound and image, snatches of ‘Pirate Jenny’ and Scott Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag’. Everything is difficult and uncomfortable and unpleasant, everybody is tired out and knows they’re ...”

“... prep school. I’ve never much wanted – though I’ve done a bit of some of them – to run, jump, swim, box, ski, row, boat, ride, fish or shoot game, and I drive too badly to do it, though I enjoy watching other people run, box, ride and race cars. But there’s scarcely any ball-game that I don’t enjoy obsessively. I’ve played and watched ...”

“... the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled by hard-swearing enthusiasts, were lost. Anne Woollett of the Hackney Marshes User Group complained that the Olympic Development Authority (ODA) had sequestered portions of East Marsh, a year ahead of their promise, to construct ‘a huge 12-lane motorway’. The ODA admitted that two trenches had ...”

“... firefighters available in London is constantly under threat. ‘They call it double-jumping, jump-crewing, variable crewing – different terms they use for it,’ Wrack said. It was clearly a struggle to get enough firefighters into the tower early enough, and they didn’t have the equipment they needed. He told me he had spoken to a number of people ...”