“... of her mother and her boss. The narrator meets Tracey at dance lessons in a sweaty-floored church hall in Willesden in 1982. They are both seven. Tracey’s ballet shoes are made of impractical satin and are tied to the ankle with ribbons, and hers are of ‘pale pink, piggy leather’, fastened to her foot with a thick strip of elastic. They notice each ...”

“... his apprenticeship with Thomas Hudson. In 1762 Francis Knowle Clark Mundy inherited Markeaton Hall. He had Wright paint him and five of his friends in the livery of the Markeaton Hunt – his father and five of his friends had sat to Devis 13 years before. Wright poses them casually. Harry Peckham stands with hand on hip; he was to die after breaking his ...”

“... people need to know.’ Even Republicans don’t like Mitt. (John McCain thought the inimitable Sarah Palin a better choice as his running mate.) At the convention, it was astonishing how many speakers barely mentioned the presidential candidate at all. In the end, there was almost nothing for a good Republican to say. His business career – however much ...”

“... honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or anally raped or has his or her ...”

“... and on this side of the Atlantic it was often republished, alongside Moore’s song about Sarah Curran, from the fourth book of Irish Melodies, there known simply by its opening words, ‘She is far from the land’, but now more defiantly identified as ‘The Betrothed of Robert Emmet’. Over the last twenty years, a reviewer of the final volumes of ...”

“... when the first great actor-managers – Philip Kemble, with his brother Charles and their sister Sarah Siddons – transformed the drama. A generation of great actors met a generation of great critics, including Hazlitt, Coleridge and Byron, and the London theatre was a centre of literary and intellectual life as never before or since. In an auditorium ...”

“... Theatre, where the classics were translated into Scouse, seedbed of poetry and stronghold of music hall as well as of the high culture of the Walker Gallery and the orchestras. Arthur Ballard, one of Lennon’s teachers at the art school, has rightly said that it took twenty years’ work to create the culture which produced John Lennon. A deeper study of this ...”

“... sons Robert, Richard E(llis) and Arthur, their daughter Margaret, and three servants – the cook, Sarah Reece, and two teenage housemaids, Emily Lunmir and Ethel Bailey. The eldest son, William, must have already moved out. In his will, my great-great-grandfather ‘desired it to be known that it was by the consent of his eldest son, William Corbett ...”

“... to the interior of New Holland (1837) hold casual buffets rather than dinner parties. In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in which female midgets play the harpsichord and tend the shrubberies. For the English the ideal ...”

“... moralised accounts of the economic successes and failures of the working classes (judgments, as Sarah Wise reminds us in her essay on morality, which applied only to the lower orders). Writing on immigration, Katie Garner notes the racialisation of Booth’s categories: his approval of ‘respectable, reliable and industrious’ German butchers, his ...”

“... and especially in Sweden, it’s a different kind of soul.’Delivering Abba’s Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech in 2010 – eat that, Christgau – Benny itemised the pan-European influences that made up the band’s sound:When all of us grew up in Sweden in the 1950s, we had no radio. So therefore we couldn’t hear rhythm and blues, or ...”

“... Alongside his factory, he had built a neoclassical mansion for his family to live in, Etruria Hall, which was depicted on one of the serving dishes he had made for Catherine the Great. The non-conforming, one-legged potter had made a place for himself in many of the most powerful and influential establishments in Britain. He had also overseen every detail ...”

“... The YBAs as a group held street markets, improvised shops and mail order art (Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas together), and installed their work in unusual and distant derelict sites (their inaugural, epoch-defining group show, Freeze, at Surrey Docks, which Hirst curated). Seen in a room in a national monument the work inevitably loses the social defiance ...”

“... as it was disdainful of the lower orders. Yet, nearly a year before Look Back in Anger, Peter Hall directed another play with one set and five characters, who perform music-hall turns, make long speeches and take off their trousers; in which nothing much happens, key elements of the first half are echoed in the ...”

“... moment of true happiness’ caused him to revert. (‘It’s the ultimate metaphor,’ as Sarah Michelle Gellar, the horror starlet who played Buffy, said. ‘You sleep with a guy and he goes bad on you.’) That was the sort of thing that happened amid the So-Cal Shakespearean ferment of that wonderful show. Whereas I hope it doesn’t give too much ...”