“... moved in with them. Reynolds did. It is as though Wordsworth had set up house with Alice Fell, Simon Lee and the old Leech-Gatherer. In 1906, after several visits to the East Devon coast, Reynolds at the age of 25 left his home town, Devizes, to become a more or less permanent lodger in the house of Bob Woolley and his family in Sidmouth. Woolley was a ...”

“... Fräulein von Kulp                  Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door – and which at the same time makes the hotel-world so fertile for comedy. For comedy proves to be the true bent of hotel-art: a hectic, jam-packed farce of disasters – and since John Irving’s novels are that anyway, powered by a ...”

“... demeaned by its occupant. Sixty years ago this month, the then Tory Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, chose to announce a new Public Order Bill in the course of an offensive and thoroughly partisan speech at Cleckheaton Town Hall which just happened to be delivered in the same week in which Labour’s annual conference ...”

“... a deep pit under the gallows, and their heads placed on poles and set on the top of Westminster Hall. That seems a fairly barbarous proceeding, though I suppose it is rather better to hang the dead than the living. The surviving regicides who had not escaped abroad were soon hunted down and duly executed. Feelings inevitably ran high in the 1660s. During ...”

“... is embedded as a deep structure across much of his work. There’s a disreputable old music hall doggerel that comes to mind here: ‘You know my cousin Maby?/You mustn’t tell a soul/She had a wooden baby/You see – she was married to a Pole.’ In the world of Coetzee’s fiction, all women are ineluctably married to a pole, being under no illusion ...”

“... yet to be appreciated by Westerners.’ George Harrison and Ravi Shankar at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 September 1974. Images of Shankar – sitting cross-legged on a carpet, playing his sitar – have become synonymous with Indian classical music, yet when his story is told it too often focuses on his starry associations. Through his friendship with ...”

“... Parliament had been rejected, he exhibited two of his massive historical paintings in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. The public flocked to the building, but to see the midget, General Tom Thumb, who was being shown downstairs. On the first day Haydon attracted only four visitors. ‘I would not have believed it of the English people,’ he wrote in his ...”

“... quotation. Can Zappa’s long career, roots in hardcore Fifties labels, finishing in the concert hall, survive Watson’s fan-from-hell, line-by-line viva? Because that’s the heart of the project: improvisations on the improvisations, a speed freak’s rush through the entire discography. (I mean, of course, you’d have to be chewing crystal to keep up ...”

“... by Goubert in the first instance as ‘of the British type’, was sometimes attached to the town hall as proof of the ‘democratisation of water’, but it was as a centre of social life – and of gossip – that it made its way from politics into literature. In Zola’s L’Assommoir there is a vivid account of ‘the wagging of tongues’ as the washing ...”

“... almost Stalinist as no one wants to be the first to stop clapping. Coming out I find myself behind Simon Williams, who has been mentioned by his son as one of Ben’s closest friends and am cheered by the possibility that if Ben could play Ambrose, so could Simon – which happily he does. But ‘lovely Ben’ the ...”

“... use – it’ll be ‘pooled’. The Guardian is getting three British embed places. The briefing hall is crammed with journalists, photographers and camera operators. There are no windows. It’s close and humid. The US colonel doing the briefing keeps referring to ‘embedding for life’, meaning that journalists are expected to stick with their assigned ...”

“... on a totally different level, shared the uncertainty and hesitations of the rest of the Party. Simon Clarke, in a bitterly hostile account of Althusserian Marxism, recounts what he chooses to call its ‘sordid history’. He suggests that when Althusser undertook the important and radical task of counterposing Marx’s authority to that of the Party ...”

“... between their female labourers and male foreman’. One girl was pursued by another into the hall, where the master of the house, Rudyard Kipling, ‘found her looking like Britannia on her pitchfork and howling “Ther dirty woman!” ’ This book has no axe to grind. It draws discriminately on published memoirs and aristocratic archives to build up a ...”

“... Near the end of the book Julius attends a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Simon Rattle. He notices details in the music for the first time, relishing for instance a third movement that is ‘loud, rude and as burlesque as it could conceivably be’. After the concert he ...”

“... when he supported Sérgio Mendes, he was booed off. In London, he played at the Royal Albert Hall supporting Fotheringay, the band formed by Sandy Denny in 1970. ‘They thought they were getting a sensitive singer-songwriter,’ Elton writes, ‘and instead they got rock’n’roll and Mr Freedom clothes and handstands on the piano keyboard. They ...”