“... and by the end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly remembers, ‘football shorts ...”

“... June. John Horder dies at 92, who, after a succession of bad doctors at university and in New York, was the physician who restored my faith in the medical profession. It was partly because he listened, as doctors have learned to do since, I hope, but which in the early 1960s they hardly did at all. Kind and in some respects saintly, his care for his ...”

“... however, Charcot had nothing to do with it. In 1931, Charcot’s son wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review: ‘Without contesting the literary and imaginative qualities of Dr Munthe I can certify that Dr Munthe never was trained by my father … I was, myself, a student at the Salpêtrière then, and can certify that he was not one of his ...”

“... Anthony Deane said Petty’s design ‘must needs prove a folly’. The navy commissioner Peter Pett told Pepys that the double-hulled ship was ‘the most dangerous thing in the world’: if it was successful, the secret would get out, and it would be the ruin of English trade and sea power. The Dutch, with whom England was about to fight the second ...”

“... mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist extremism’, he said, Egypt was a crucial ally and the UK was ‘keen to expand practical ...”

“... well down his list of priorities. ‘I don’t care about copyright law,’ he told his friend Peter Eckersley in 2010. ‘Healthcare, financial reform – those are the issues that I work on, not something obscure like copyright law.’ He had a change of heart about freedom of information more generally: he’d started to notice that the government and ...”

“... not the son of his mother’s husband, Joseph. The accusation is repeated in the Chester and York plays, while in the Towneley plays the preferred word is ‘mare’ (as in ‘night-mare’, being ridden by a succubus). The famous Second Shepherds’ Play of the Towneley cycle has the sheep-stealer Mak’s wife, Gill, pretend that the lamb they have ...”

“... the Ormonde Hotel during the first nights of the Blitz until he secured a berth on a boat to New York. Read’s ‘nest of gentle artists’ had scattered to the winds. If the Isokon​ stands for modernism’s prewar moment in Britain, then a flat-roofed glass house in the Scottish Borders gives us its postwar legacy. High Sunderland was commissioned in ...”

“... US embassy in London about a minor German plot to steal secrets from an American colonel in New York. After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the US to discuss the case with American officials and to push for more co-operation between British security services and the FBI. But as Kerbaj’s account shows, he didn’t ...”

“... were ‘infested with tigers’. But – like the late antique holy men studied by the historian Peter Brown – these gurus remained involved with the societies they had fled. In the years before his trip to Chicago, Datta went far beyond Bengal, visiting Hinduism’s holiest places. Like the Buddhist lama in Kipling’s Kim, whose ‘search’ for a holy ...”

“... nothing to do with misfortune. It was the result of systematic fraud, conducted by what the New York District Attorney called ‘a corrupt and criminal organisation’ over a period of nearly twenty years. The mastermind behind the fraud was Agha Hassan Abedi. Abedi had what is known inside banks as charisma and outside banks as a nice line in drivel. He ...”

“... It has all become too ugly, too personal. Weather can no longer be mentioned in polite society. As Peter Redgrove points out in his provocative study, The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense, we are ‘so violently affected by weather change ... that it can easily become a clinical problem’. Redgrove confesses himself a ‘Jekyll and Hyde to the weather’. He ...”

“... by singers and conductors to the stodgy naturalistic productions put on by companies like New York’s Metropolitan or the revisionist stagings originally mounted by Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, during the post-war years at Bayreuth and followed variously there and elsewhere by Patrice Chéreau, Götz Friedrich, Ruth Berghaus, Harry ...”

“... a slight resentment towards translations, and in his clever ‘Poem Waiting to be Translated’, Peter Porter asks: Why not remember the heroes of hard situations, those who answered inquisitors in fresh parables, whose lyrical rejoinders are assembled here in memorial Penguins? Porter is glancing at the work of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, and ...”

“... the pace of Pinget translations seems to have been hotted up by an enterprising small press in New York, Red Dust, who have not only reinstated the missing Passacaglia out proceeded to fill most remaining gaps with their stylish and relatively cheap publications. That Voice (Pinget’s penultimate novel, dating from 1975) appears in the company of Between ...”