“... in Tony Palmer’s film about Britten, A Time There Was, when the composer’s housekeeper, Miss Hudson, explains in her beautiful East Anglian accent, what kind of food he and Pears liked:They were home-cookin’ lovers, but Mr Pears come home from abroad and he’d bring a Continental recipe for me to do; he was more for food than Mr Britten … Mr Pears ...”

“... and settled in New York, William Evans Burton stored his splendid collection in his house on Hudson Street; he found Keese’s auctions as exciting as the theatre. He was among the bidders on the Saturday night when Keese sold Lamb’s Chaucer, which he bought for $25.Together with his essays, Lamb’s library gave collectors a language and a ...”

“... said to be overgrown and eroded now, but somehow to see the place that supplied the stone and the mark the men made who quarried it seems much more evocative than the actual wall itself. Instead we buy a couple of George III country chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 ...”

“... or comically fantasising old maid pretending to herself she leads a double life) seems to mark her as going in for what we can recognise as a modern form, the madman’s tale, without being in control of what she means by it. Perhaps the lack of control is itself characteristically modern: at any rate, The Whole Family is shell-shocked after the ...”

“... million,’ said Trump. ‘Who the hell knows what it is worth?’) His casino empire across the Hudson River in Atlantic City, his Taj Mahal, went belly up. (‘The most spectacular hotel-casino anywhere in the world’.) He declared bankruptcy four times in order to stiff his contractors and workers. Every financial house in the city spurned his plea to ...”

“... I want to slowly sink my teeth into his haunch until his symmetry suffers.’ She had one child, Mark, and soon became pregnant with another. When Suttman left, she put up an Elvis poster and presumably began sleeping with her nose out again. It never did seem to lose its initial uplift. The night before her second son, Jeff, was born, Berlin went to hear ...”

“... to provoke the attackers. To describe the assault as ‘mindless’ might not be so wide of the mark: it was vicious and random – typical, some would say, of an entire spectrum of violence intrinsic to modern Britain. Victim and assailants could have been typecast: Ford was blameless, a ‘promising’ lad; McCluskie and Reynolds were almost parodically ...”

“... Meanwhile, Making It would go down in legend and out of print, a sunken landmark of sorts. To mark​ the fiftieth anniversary of Making It, NYRB Classics has revived Podhoretz’s battle-scarred memoir with an innocuous new introduction by Terry Teachout, Commentary’s critic at large, who isn’t about to jeopardise his post by saying anything too ...”

“... of the Ordsall Chord. A nuance: the leader of the campaign to stop it being built as planned, Mark Whitby, former president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, proposes an alternative route that would retain the historic station’s access to the rail network and keep intact more of the structures designed by George Stephenson, the engineer who built ...”

“... and places I couldn’t visit (the house in St Luke’s Road with a brown plaque in memory of W.H. Hudson) because they either reminded me of her and therefore of death or of death and therefore of her. I kept on telling myself: ‘I mustn’t be rushed.’ Somehow or other, the friends had to be warned off, kept at bay. I desired the hitherto unattainable ...”

“... and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though favourable allusion. While he was writing Aspects of the Novel ...”

“... to reach Glasgow directly. Port Glasgow found its future as a shipbuilding town, making its mark in industrial history and the pantheon of Scottish innovation by launching Europe’s first commercial steamship, the Comet, in 1812. Migrant workers arrived from the Highlands and the rural Lowlands, and especially from the place Victorian writers nicely ...”