“... surely sighing, ‘this is going to be a story in a kitsch language about kitsch and I refuse to read it.’ Well, guess what – you have no choice! How many centuries has it been since Western culture peaked? Two, maybe three? Do you really expect anyone, not just me, but anyone to write a story in 2005 that will tell you something you didn’t know about ...”

“... David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature.’ And no one could read more than a couple of her novels without recognising that they usually take place in summer, often in a large house, and rarely shift their gaze significantly below the upper-middle-classes. Her people have too much time to do anything except fall in ...”

“... for example, hidden behind the screen in The School for Scandal while two elderly knights as Sir Peter Teazle and Joseph Surface crawled with maddening deliberation and pointless pauses through their scene. Suddenly losing patience, she boomed aloud for all to hear: ‘Oh, do get a move on, you silly old pongers!’ Or the one about John Barrymore as Richard ...”

“... talents like Haggard often become potent voices of their age. If the book itself is no longer read, the Africa that most Englishmen imagine is all too close to the land invented in ...”

“... on manners tried to refine the practices of bed-sharing, spitting and blowing the nose (one may read about the ‘sociogenesis’ and ‘psychogenesis’ of these teachings in Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, and doubtless elsewhere). Two centuries ago, when John Debrett became a miscellaneous publisher, his contemporary advice-givers had moved on ...”

“... a section from I See a Silence, a series of poems by Ilya Kaminsky commissioned for Afterness and read by Kaminsky and two actors:Ness exhaustswith skylarks, boat motors, gulls, gravel, with the embarrassed silence of an empty stairwell in the ballistics building, with goosesteps, knowing that silence of the living is visible at Ness, in your lungs and in ...”

“... The Australian film-maker Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously is set in Djakarta shortly before the failed Communist coup of 1965. The story concerns three characters: Guy Hamilton, a half-Australian, half-American reporter working on his first big assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Jill Bryant, English assistant to the British military attachè; and Billy Kwan, a dwarf-like photographer who is half-Australian, half-Chinese, and who takes secret photographs and keeps lengthy files on the other characters, especially the ones he cares about ...”

“... Throughout the time that he was Prime Minister Clement Attlee read only the Times. He was, he said, too busy to bother with other newspapers. The fact that the Times was firmly Tory and, after a few years of Labour Government, almost hysterically anti-socialist, didn’t worry him at all. ‘That’s what one expects,’ he said ...”

“... shot was an RA portrait-painter called Meredith Frampton, whose father Sir George had designed the Peter Pan monument in Kensington Gardens. She asked him to paint her a tree near it. He obliged, enchanted by the beautiful Canadian, but basically he was a quiet man who lived with his mother, and nothing came of it. Elizabeth was very kind to him, but ...”

“... country’s budget, presented by the Finance Minister, Richard Hu. Politicians in the G7 must have read him and wept. He forecast growth rates of up to 8 per cent. It’s ironic that the long-term strategy of the Lion City involves exploiting uncertainty over the financial stability of Hong Kong, but Singapore wants the business that it calculates will be ...”

“... ruin and general beastliness, not sure why good old Bob Mellish was being so rude to nice young Peter Tatchell. The vicious graffiti about Tatchell were gleefully reported: not so the more libellous graffiti about Mellish. None of this applies to Darlington. Here the Labour Movement, left and right, finds it quite easy to remain united – though members ...”

“... as numbers of votes became the crucial determinant of political power this was a fatal weakness. Peter Merkl’s computerised analysis of the autobiographies of 581 members of the Nazi Party shows anti-semitism to have been a much stronger motive for joining before 1923 than afterwards. What is more, it shows, not only that anti-semitism was subordinate to ...”

“... is paid to nanoseconds and megabytes, and in his spare time, we are told, he ‘likes to read/ Eclectically from Mann to Bede’. If so, he reads merely from boredom, since it has no measurable effects upon his life. There could hardly be a more striking contrast with Pushkin’s characters. Onegin and his Tatyana may not have been great readers, but ...”

“... boyish, plain-faced Willa and her handsome, theatrical, feminine mother who bore seven children, read romantic fiction – including Sir Walter Scott – and dominated her family. There seems to have been much struggle against her daughter’s adolescent ‘William Cather Jr’ role: Willa wanted none of the Southern lady posture and decorum. But the mature ...”