“... of this is new. There has always been a ‘push and pull’, as he puts it, between COBA, City Hall, the federal courts, lawyers, activists, incarcerated people and public opinion. Shanahan was himself briefly detained on Rikers, in 2014, after taking part in a protest against the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His book is an ...”

“... and an alcove whose wall was thick with black mould. When it was occupied, the patrons used the hall, which was, except for the sink and the hole, indistinguishable from the lavatory. This is one thing I remember about the pub; the other thing I remember is that the pub was called the Jesse James. Someone told me it was named for James because his people ...”

“... space for any genre, any costume and any voice. You can make it a detective thriller, like John Lawton’s Riptide, set in London in 1941, featuring Sergeant Troy of the Yard. You can make it modern picaresque, a frenetic burst of lyrical futurist imagery, like Rodney Hall’s The Day We Had Hitler Home, which is ...”

“... by an ungainly country house, a cross between two seasoned favourites of Olden Times, Hardwick Hall and Burleigh, on which the pierced parapet spells out, instead of a heraldic motto, ‘a stitch in time saves nine’. Lancaster’s high points are the Greeks, the Gothic of Chartres, the Georgian terrace and the English Renaissance of Jones and Wren, which ...”

“... harmlessly away). Katharina’s case stalled until October 1616, when Einhorn sent a report to John Frederick, the duke of Württemberg, detailing the accusations against her, which now included hurting children. Ducal councillors ordered the governor to detain the suspect. But Katharina had already left Leonberg to be with her son in Linz. Katharina made ...”

“... when an unhealed wound remains? Not long before the vote, the point was cruelly rubbed in. John Howard’s Liberal-Coalition government made the unusual decision to invade its own country, by sending the Australian Defence Force into the Northern Territory. His aim was to deal decisively with concerns about child abuse and corruption among the mainly ...”

“... with their secretaries. I imagined there were sub-species of adultery going on, up and down John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Corn Exchange, but we never did matrimonial, or if we did the clerks locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free ...”

“... Late Georgian London had the best of both worlds. Haydon could show his Jerusalem in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, itself an exercise in a fantasy style inspired by Napoleon’s campaign. The crowd who came to see it included Mrs Siddons, whose imposing, if now ageing, figure haunts The Immortal Dinner. When she said that Haydon’s rendering of the face ...”

“... passed through long corridors and many locked and relocked doors, I was ushered into a large hall containing about a hundred people … Many of the inhabitants underwent major brain operations, and consequently many were shaven-headed. Others were swathed in bandages and were disfigured by post-operative bruises and black eyes.The patients were dressed ...”

“... the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s successor – though the latter continued to dominate, she believes – was a likeable character; and George Matthews (still active today) seemed, as he did to everyone, a man full of ‘earnest honesty’. The Party set up in 1920 was ...”

“... a hundred years before Parliament paid out about five times that amount to the ‘lone genius’ John Harrison in 1773 for the magnificent marine chronometer that provided a working solution to the longitude problem. The patent Hooke wanted was a type of ‘Letters Patent’ – literally ‘open letters’, sealed but not sealed up, conferring the special ...”

“... wounded supporters (including Booth in The Poet’s Plight) are still contending against them. John Osborne (director of American Studies at Hull) attempted to refute those denigrating Larkin on ideological grounds in his 2008 Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence; his new book, Radical Larkin, fortified with literary theory, wishes to reclaim Larkin as a ...”

“... in April 1984. His various drafts and notes have been ‘recovered and edited’ by his colleague, John Henry Jones. The result is often as maddeningly fragmentary as Faustus itself, and it is festooned with more footnotes than a redaction of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it has all the Empson hallmarks – the density of ideation, the abrasive wit, the marvellous ...”

“... who took an interest in their pupils. In the first years of the century, Joseph Jowett of Trinity Hall (who arranged the setting from Handel which became famous as the chime of Big Ben) was noted ‘for the perennial freshness of his interest in young men’ – though he, like Simeon, was drawn to them by his evangelical faith in their souls as well as by ...”

“... has eluded them, and its subject is one of the four or five people who stick in my gullet. John Traill Christie was my headmaster for just over four years. I never knew him well, though I have had to think about him a lot. For a brief period I must have occupied his thoughts because he spent about a term and a half, which coincided with some of ...”