“... we glimpse Berlin during the Weimar Republic: extravagant dinners eaten in expensive hotels, young women in satin slippers, their businessmen husbands carrying jewel-encrusted cigar cases. These were the happy times Lilli wanted to talk about. Their friends the Kutscheras, who owned Café Wien on Kurfürstendamm, also survived the war, but their ...”

“... We know these to be facts because newspapers and electronic media have exposed them fearlessly. David Cameron, when he was prime minister, was so concerned about the situation that he appointed the veteran Tory politician and entrepreneur Lord Young to report on the state of health and safety legislation and ‘the rise ...”

“... of Timber (or ‘Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter’). In an age when most writers burned out young, Jonson kept on going. Right at the end, embattled by debt and alcoholism, half-paralysed by a stroke, he was still at work. Among his last pieces was probably the English Grammar, published posthumously in 1640. It shows him still niggling away at the nuts ...”

“... those who were ‘Wrong but Wromantic’. ‘I’m a Whig or little better,’ says Stevenson’s David Balfour by way of apologetic preamble to his admiring recognition of the un-Whig virtues of the Highland clans. Many must have been tempted to agree with W.B. Yeats’s (or his Sage’s) uncompromising answer to his own ...”

“... make of his sailors, like the one who leans on a table spread with good things in Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food. The housewives doubtless thought they were nice lads; in life and art the physical types which attracted Minton were butch. The boys in Hockney’s Cavafy illustrations would not have stepped so easily or so politely onto Mrs ...”

“... One of the strongest and strangest moments in David Lynch’s unsettling TV serial Twin Peaks, part of the dream of wholesome investigating agent Dale Cooper, comes when he is kissed full on the mouth by the figure of Laura Palmer, who was a ‘wild girl’ but is now dead and whose murderer he has come to town to detect ...”

“... a minute, it would be ready to be smoked.’ It is no wonder that William’s favourite game as a young child was one called ‘being important’. When I was about three years old somebody gave me a small attaché case and what was then called a ‘stylographic pen’... My game was to rummage about in my case, pull out a sheaf of papers, shuffle them, and ...”

“... historical inquiries, including a definitive study of the Jewish Holocaust. Ratushinskaya and her young husband Igor Gerashchenko, who contributes a dignified note on the circumstances of her arrest, were not Jewish. As he puts it, with rather touching quaintness, ‘the Soviet way of life was equally unacceptable to both Irina and myself,’ and in 1980 they ...”

“... be prime-time viewing. A Frenchwoman, a survivor of Hitler’s death camps, helps an ingenious young Dutch Socialist to outwit the Scrooge-like Establishment. Hundreds of millions of pounds are at stake. The rank-and-file defy the mighty. Law confronts power. Three Governments risk being taken to court. All this is part of the story unfolded by Davids ...”

“... and race ‘functions 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 ...”

“... explain why Obama won relatively comfortably). Obama had huge majorities among ethnic minorities, young people, single people, gay people. Old people, married people, people with children voted for Romney. On the upbeat account, this is all fine. Obama won among the demographics that are growing; Romney among the demographics that are shrinking. The ...”

“... candidate for Dunfermline East (thanks to his ‘great friend Jim McIntyre’ and a group of young shop stewards from the Rosyth Dockyard, who ‘included Charlie Boyle, Helen Dowie, Jimmy Dyce, Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer’). As this ...”

“... in whose company he ‘could drop his guard’. Cows were early subjects – he told his friend David Wojnarowicz that he’d taken a photo of them from a great distance when he was first experimenting: ‘The cows were like a hundred feet away. I mean, three little black dots … but I knew it was cows in a field.’ As an adult, he took some striking ...”

“... wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write ...”

“... the words appear, splattered in a typeface that’s like a modern memorandum or a press release. Young Glen, though he can’t be so young today, had a good ghost writer in Pete Silverton. I guess that Pete pretty accurately represents Glen’s voice, as well as his ambitions. In the words of the blurb, ‘Matlock ...”