“... at his local garden centre. For the show about cars he remembered the ones he’d coveted as a child. It’s never easy to know how seriously to take all this stuff, given his predilection for faking his own biography, but that is part of the pleasure (as it is with his memoirs). You often get the sense that he treats the whole thing as a big joke, and ...”

“... The major contribution of the English theatre to last year’s Brecht centenary was Lee Hall’s dazzling version of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, presented by the Right Size, a touring company led by the comic actors Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. Their prologue goes some way to explaining why the Anglophone response to the Brechtfest was so muted ...”

“... Isla Leigh, perhaps masquerading as husband and wife, perhaps as siblings, perhaps as parent and child. The book was poorly reviewed; the combination of startlingly bold, hybrid material with co-authorship of an uncertain nature seems to have predetermined its reception as incoherent.So it was as a single person, Michael Field, that Bradley and Cooper chose ...”

“... Blame Me. Alison Lurie includes the best of them from the second collection, ‘Gertrude’s Child’, about a wooden doll who gets tired of being knocked about by her owner, runs away and buys a little girl of her own from the old man who sells such things. The doll Gertrude is not deliberately cruel or vengeful, but she does not realise that children ...”

“... that Wagner’s endless melody was nothing but discord.’ I imagine it was the Vandaleur Lee ‘method’ of training the singing voice (which, Shaw claimed, preserved his mother’s voice ‘perfectly until her death at over 80’) that Shaw adapted to speech, first training himself as a public speaker, with results to be heard in recordings of his ...”

“... entire family might have been executed. The Romans accused the Christians of practising orgies and child sacrifice. The Christians, once established in power, made similar accusations against the Jews and many sects they deemed heretical. Michael Constantine Psellos, the Byzantine philosopher, wrote about the Bogomils: In the evening, when the candles are ...”

“... island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not circular, the way it’s set into the lee of the hill, makes me think it must be an old stone cabin, how old I don’t know, but it would have been inhabited by Gaelic speakers who cut hay on the two hidden meadows further up the hill, or grew potatoes or oats on them. It’s a hot, sunny July ...”

“... history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with Soul. Along the way, that history has appropriated the music on behalf of a white audience by perpetuating the ...”

“... feminist critiques of the crimes of an all-pervasive patriarchy, revelations of widespread child abuse and incest, new-journalistic explorations of the criminal mind, and endless press leaks about the secret love-lives of notables. It sometimes seems as if ‘routine news reporting’ is an empty category, that the only news (and scholarship) that ...”

“... had been to Chequers, wondering what new inanities would result. To Brooke, Churchill was a child – a most brilliant and demanding hyperactive political child, whom he could, given time and God’s grace, come to control as his military governess. But to have two such children, with Mountbatten joining ...”

“... is a mob town with murky connections to Kennedy conspiracies, voodoo, vampire faggots, jazz, child brothels and all the trash, black and white, of the Delta. It wasn’t a place – with its ‘meaty, rich smell of frying shrimp’, its ‘palms, hibiscus, yucca trees and rubber plants’ – to be closely associated with Clinton’s make-over into a ...”

“... never have been aborted, no matter the possible outcome (probably a bloodbath in Tehran). I was a child at the time, living in Mashhad, three hundred miles north of Tabas. The Islamic Republic broadcast images of the incinerated wreckage of the aircraft on TV and invoked the Elephant (Al-Fil) chapter of the Quran to explain the ‘miraculous’ US defeat. In ...”

“... Marlon Brando could be a paraplegic after the war, he could be Zapata, Napoleon, a mafia don, or Lee Clayton, swanning around the Missouri Breaks country in a dress, a bonnet and an italic Irish accent. He might be a used-up ex-boxer on the Jersey docks. Or an actor pretending to be that punchdrunk bum few of us would care to notice in life. We’d rather ...”

“... sound like one. She sounds like a hammy male actor in late middle age – perhaps Christopher Lee in his prime, or Simon Callow. She is Gin Rathbone, and she introduces herself with these fine words: ‘I am a tall, thin, untidy Englishwoman, I drink too much and yes, I suppose I am rather – oh, detached – distant, aloof – snobbish, even, I have ...”

“... when I haven’t heard a word, I sit halfway down the south aisle festooned in hearing aids in the lee of a plaque to Flora Robson. But someone must have taken the acoustics in hand because if anything it’s too noisy and I turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst ...”