“... and fumed at a ‘smart-alecky’ review of some avant-garde magazines, deciding it was written by John Willett (its real author was in fact his near-namesake Ian Hamilton, never the warmest admirer of the Scottish avant-garde). He felt too good for the Scottish papers and too isolated for the English ones, though when visitors beat a path to his door they ...”

“... to promise a high-class thriller, though the 1970s setting suggests murky dealings – with John le Carré being thanked, under the non-pen name of David Cornwell, for ‘irresistible reminiscences’ – rather than any particular glamour. Serena Frome (the pronunciation of her name, Froom, poshly at odds with its spelling), both intelligent and ...”

“... torments and frightful beasts painted like jewels. More recently, the awakened creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing, and H.R. Giger’s alien in the films of the same name are offered only in brief glimpses, to tease the audience, which wants to look long and hard on their strange and extraordinary beauty. Aesthetically as well as practically, it ...”

“... and the young and depraved pauper ‘Kay’ – even found themselves propelled onto the music hall stage or living a ghostly afterlife in fiction and verse. Traces of Greenwood’s prose and characters can still be heard in Orwell’s ‘down and out’ accounts, written more than fifty years later. What gave ‘A Night in a Workhouse’ this power? What ...”

“... Man?) good looks made him, too, a valuable commodity at the Caroline Court. This was John Churchill, toy boy of the Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s discarded mistresses. Churchill, too, was treading a familiar trail: his elder sister was the Duke of York’s concubine. They married secretly, against the wishes of both families, and ...”

“... may suggest, the level of sheer verbal force and arresting cadence is abnormally high. His friend John Sterling registered these characteristics when he thanked him for two recent letters ‘which, unlike other people’s, have the writer’s signature in every word as well as at the end’. The project to collect, edit and publish all known letters by ...”

“... of the Royal College of Surgeons. It is sometimes used for teaching, and is open to the public. John Hunter (1728-93), the first person to articulate an elephant’s skeleton, was the younger brother of William Hunter. Both men were pioneering teachers of anatomy. John set up the museum to house his anatomical ...”

“... fuck you up, your mum and dad’ recited by a thousand Girl Guides in the Royal Albert Hall.12 January. Read Macbeth for maybe the second time in my life (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it). Much of the language is as opaque as I generally find Shakespeare but I’m struck by how soon he gets down to business, so that within a scene the play ...”

“... a bang, but the rest knew nothing until, about twenty minutes later, Mr Kebede appeared in the hall in his stockinged feet, saying there was a fire in his flat. He thought it had started at the back of his fridge. He called the police before going to the door of his next-door neighbour, Maryam Adam, who was three months pregnant. ‘It was exactly 12.50 ...”

“... too little and too lately known,’ Dryden wrote in a pompous, self-serving poem prefixed to John Oldham’s Remains in Verse and Prose (1684). Oldham had died of smallpox the previous December, at the age of 30, at the house of the Earl of Kingston, a young nobleman who had recently become his patron. He left behind a large body of work, now available ...”

“... into what had happened on that never-forgotten, never-forgiven day. Muzak crooned in the arrival hall, stalls offered stuffed leprechauns, Guinness T-shirts and ‘Kiss Me I’m Irish’ buttons. Passengers chatted over caffe latte and croissants. Could this be the Ulster I last laid eyes on thirty years ago? Where were the sandbags, the razor wire, the ...”

“... defendants (the journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, and the former signals corporal, John Berry) meditating passing any information to ‘the enemy’ – except (an important qualification) insofar as the British Security Services have always regarded the British public as the enemy. The ABC Trial was intended to be a sensational public show ...”

“... of the stranger allies of the missing child’s mother is a self-appointed representative called John Calvin, the moving spirit behind the local Neighbourhood Watch. Borrowing for this character the name of a punitive theologian, who doled out self-satisfaction to the elect and despair to those destined to be damned, isn’t likely to be a novelist’s mark ...”

“... books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the grander squares in Leeds, where the posh doctors and surgeons from the Brotherton Wing had their consulting-rooms. Nowadays the ring road makes the square difficult to get to and it’s in a bad ...”

“... and statues of the Fonte Gaia, the municipal fountain that originally stood opposite the town hall in Siena. Although neither San Petronio nor the Fonte Gaia reflects much interest in the antique Roman architecture, ornament and figure style that so absorbed leading Florentine sculptors at the time, the tomb chest on which the effigy of Ilaria lies is ...”