“... stage, he said, ‘was where I master time’. Springsteen bet his life on music. ‘Whatever it took, I was in,’ he said. He and his various early bands sucked up the rejection of audiences, record producers, promoters. His credo, as one of his songs puts it, was ‘no retreat, no surrender’. ‘They didn’t understand they were dealing with men ...”

“... plenty of damage. (In the case of H. floresiensis, Indonesia’s leading palaeoanthropologist took the first skeleton away for himself, kept it for a period of months, and returned it severely damaged.) I especially like Neolithic sites, in which Britain and Ireland are very rich: I love the sense that by stretching out our imagination and empathy in ...”

“... McFarlane to contribute to his biographical series ‘Teach Yourself History’ a short book on John Wyclif, an Oxford intellectual dead for six hundred years and the only arch-heretic bred in Catholic England before the Tudors and the Reformation. In one way this wasn’t surprising, since Rowse and McFarlane were friends. But in another way it was, since ...”

“... In February, two elderly men met in a Middle Eastern suburb and took afternoon tea. As old men do, they reminisced, chatted about their grandchildren and speculated on the perilous state of the world. The younger of the two had a problem: he had a reputation for being an aggressor and none of his neighbours, or his neighbours’ powerful friends, believed him when he said he had put away his weapons for good ...”

“... may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants. Here was the promise of a main event in the comet’s six-year visit to the Anglo-Scottish cultural ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... One of John Cheever’s most famous stories is called ‘The Swimmer’. It is set, like much of his fiction, in the lawned suburbs somewhere outside New York City, and it is filled, like most of his fiction, with despair. The hero, Neddy Merrill, the father of four daughters, is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way ...”

“... Rudolf Schlichter. Works by Georg Grosz hung on the wall; Kurt Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin and John Heartfield were regulars. Brecht and his crowd were fascinated by America, by its new, brutal version of capitalism which was remaking the world, by its technology and its popular culture. The fascination found its way into his verse and his plays. He went ...”

“... on Churchill’s life at Chartwell during the Twenties and Thirties. His son, the third Earl, who took over the work, died tragically young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his ...”

“... them. ‘The monastery of Evesham was suppressed by King Henry VIII … at evensong time,’ John of Alcester recorded, ‘the convent being in the choir at this verse Deposuit potentes, and would not suffer them to make an end.’ Four years into the dissolution, there were few wealthy abbeys left to seize; the very last was Waltham Abbey, on 23 March ...”

“... on Robert Peel, the prime minister. The young and impressionable Engels, whose daily walk to work took him past the Manchester offices of the Cobden brothers’ calico empire, was impressed. For the rest of his life, Engels was convinced that Cobden was the archetype of the English revolutionary bourgeois. So was Marx. Nowadays, Cobden is revered as the ...”

“... a sense that justice has at last been done. Everyone who knew the full story of Dickens and Ternan took their knowledge, or almost all of it, to the grave. What we can gather about the relationship falls into three categories: incontrovertible facts, controversial facts, and hypotheses drawn from the facts. Incontrovertible is that Dickens first met Ellen ...”

“... or ethnic hatred is a nefarious fabrication. Eventually, in the 19th century, nationalism took root, accompanied by the idea that a nation’s territory should include all its nationals. This idea gradually spread among Bosnia’s neighbours, in Serbia (then establishing itself as an independent state), and in Croatia (then part of the Habsburg ...”

“... 20th century seem quite other than the kind which Lewis’s Déco monologue expounded, foretold, took relish in. In a lucid introduction and in linking commentaries between the selections in the book, Julian Symons remarks on the way Lewis ‘formulated a philosophy radically critical of many shibboleths respected by the intellectual society of the ...”

“... answer to an enigmatic question might well determine the rest of your life. Born in 1933, Storey took the exam in 1944, the year in which the Butler Education Act came into force. He was one of the saved and made it to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Wakefield. The problems of the grammar-school boy like Storey were anatomised by Richard Hoggart in the ...”