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“... of correspondences between colour, shape and sound is ruined under the collective onslaught of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and ‘happenings’ (Gesamtkunstwerk with a Beatnik twist). These ideas started to gain focus and coherence in the 1950s, just as the technology became available to realise them, and yet ...”

“... Elsie, Strong recalls without irony, was ‘a better class of person’, the same evocative phrase John Osborne used, with heavy irony, as the title of his autobiography. Osborne was six years older than Strong and from a strikingly similar background about which he was equally unforgiving, as was another close contemporary, Joe Orton. The three make a ...”

“... of the information that War and Peace contains. Even novels in which almost nothing happens – John McGahern’s, for instance – will speak in historical whispers, aiming to ‘disimprison’, as Coleridge once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following ...”

“... 1953, that set him on a zigzag path to articulating the structure of haemoglobin. He told Andrew Brown, Bernal’s biographer, that the application of the replacement technique to proteins was ‘my idea and my discovery. If you like, it’s what I am famous for.’ In 1962, Perutz’s work on the structure of haemoglobin won him the Nobel Prize for ...”

“... A new deputy headmaster came to the school; you could tell by looking at his hair that he was all brown rice and liberal experiment, so I wrote him a well-spelled note about reversing the method used for the picking of teams. I remember the day and the very hour. ‘O’Hagan,’ the PE assistant said, ‘pick your team.’ I walked the few yards onto the ...”

“... Virgin and Child, and an object resembling a hairy man – ‘some say a hermit, others think John the Baptist.’Kircher’s contemporaries puzzled over fossilised animals and their distribution. The Walloon mathematician René-François de Sluse wrote to the Royal Society in London enclosing a sketch of stones resembling shellfish: ‘It is strange that ...”

“... ornamentally in service to academic publication and career trajectories’. David Sterling Brown’s essay on Shakespeare’s near obsession with white women’s white hands doesn’t bring in his own lived experience, but his monograph Shakespeare’s White Others – in which Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra and Othello are used as case ...”

“... grinning or laughing; it was strange to see him without a smile. I remembered watching Gordon Brown at a press conference once while Tony Blair was PM, curious about what he would do with his face while Blair was taking questions, and I saw Farage was doing what Brown had: looking away from the other speakers and the ...”

“... they discerned the ‘colouring’ and ‘diction’ of Shakespeare’s younger contemporary John Fletcher, rather than Shakespeare himself, in the play. Others objected that as for ‘the tale of this play being built upon a novel in Don Quixote, chronology is against us, and Shakespeare could not be the author.’ This last, at least, Theobald was able ...”

“... wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No war is to be wished for, but if they have to be fought, this was ...”

“... enemy – hence the scandalous attempt by a committee of right-wing Labour MPs headed by George Brown to get MI5 to spy on their left-wing opponents within the Party in 1961, and Wilson’s use of MI5 against the seamen’s strike in 1966. Meanwhile the successive defections of Maclean, Burgess and Philby not only created an atmosphere of hysterical ...”

“... 1969 and the moment when real money, the paper kind that came with a few silver coins in a small brown envelope, disappeared. For ever. I had a casual labouring job, unloading containers and stacking trucks and vans in muddy sheds alongside the railway in Stratford. Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, Stratford East: a wonderful bucolic address, backed up by a ...”

“... well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too absorbed), laying down barrels of Sauerkraut, cutting ...”

“... the outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and ...”

“... is why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna ...”