“... banshees. But at the end of the last century M.R. James’s head lay easy, pillowed on Eton and King’s. In the introduction to this reissue, ‘Monty’s’ stories are made, by one of the Oxford Book editors, to look like a game which registers a displacement of the erotic. ‘Even the deepest friendship of his life, with James McBryde, stopped well ...”

“... Shirley Bassey: the real ones and the impersonators. The amazing Barbara Windsor with her Don King candy floss hairdo – a fashion victim who has just dropped from the top of the Post Office Tower with her beehive as a parachute. Christine Keeler, Paul Raymond, Malcolm Allison. The Society Restaurant, The Colony Club. Crisp white linen and more bottles ...”

“... He had trained as a painter – including a spell at the Royal College of Art. He had danced for King George V, and Anna Pavlova had invited him to choreograph a set of Indian dances, which were performed at Covent Garden the year before his father’s ballet was put on there. ‘He is endowed with one of the most perfect bodies I have ever seen in a man in ...”

“... Kathy, Whitney was abused as a child. Aged twelve, she was groomed and ‘seduced’ by Tony King, her guardian’s fiancé, who is eventually sent to jail and kills himself in his cell. It was the first time the theme of underage abuse had been broached in a British soap opera, with the Daily Mirror calling it ‘one of the darkest and most disturbing ...”

“... seems to end with a Phlebas-style death by water (‘Now lies he there/Tip to tip washed beneath Charles’ Wagon’), a fate presented as somewhat preferable to that of the ‘tortured’, just-married protagonist: ‘When the bridegroom smoothed his hair/There was blood upon the bed.’ The line is often taken to refer to the Eliots’ disastrous honeymoon ...”

“... pursuit of their rights, legitimately claimed. The movement’s success owed much to Martin Luther King’s strategy of non-violence, but it also had to do with the co-ordination between a ‘primary’ mass mobilisation of citizens and a skilful activist leadership, who could channel popular energy into sustained and effective campaigns, and build alliances ...”

“... niece), Katharine. ‘Will’ Fullerton went to Harvard in the 1880s and studied art history under Charles Eliot Norton. Santayana (who wrote him some bawdy letters) and Bernard Berenson were contemporaries. (So he touched on Wharton’s world years before he met her.) He wanted a fellowship but, to his lasting disappointment, he didn’t get one. He travelled ...”

“... world which admirers could happily recognise and inhabit. When Alton Locke, the tailor in Charles Kingsley’s novel, reads Tennyson’s descriptions of the dreary Lincolnshire flats he feels he has had his eyes opened to an unexpected universe: ‘The desolate pools and creeks where the dying swan floated, the hint of the silvery marsh mosses by ...”

“... currency of account. It was a major coup for what was then a small commercial centre. There was no king’s or duke’s head on the florin. Florence had long since banned nobility from involvement in its government, which was now republican, the nine executive members elected by lot from among the patrician community every two months, so that no one person ...”

“... systems and partly in systems of political and military control. Every technological system, as Charles Perrow has observed, has its characteristic ‘normal accident’. The things that Murphy’s Law says will (or can) go wrong depend on the design of technical and human systems that are intended to ensure the weapons work. In the early atomic age, bombs ...”

“... Standing on the deck of the sinking Lusitania, the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman spoke his last words. ‘Why fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages ...”

“... and works rather than people. Nostalgia is the be-all-and-end-all of pop, and Morrissey is the king of all that, so when he became a star himself (and began featuring his own mug on his record sleeves) he had succeeded in creating an audience literally after his own image, a tribe inured to the modes and manners of heightened fandom. It therefore seems ...”

“... system and drawn attention to what are known as ‘variable stars’. So much event! Charles Pickering, the director who hired Mrs Fleming and who oversaw the years when the number of women computers grew from three to twenty, is not only dashing and interested in women’s intellectual development, but also comes co-cast with a prodigal brother ...”

“... sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders?’ The longing not to thin out the ecosphere of language leads to movements such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s campaign for African writers to write in African ...”

“... sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for doing so). By contrast, in the Civil War, the overwhelming majority who took up arms fought for the United States (the Confederacy having stubbornly resisted proposals to arm slaves until the very eve of its ...”