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“... by Brahms, but it looks forward as well as back: add a French horn and it could almost be part of Benjamin Britten’s Serenade (1943), his cycle on night and dreams.With Five Elizabethan Songs Gurney felt he was knocking on the door of mastery. ‘Blister my kidneys,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘if the music is not as English, as joyful, as tender as any ...”

“... editions of the Pevsner Suffolk guide. Once slim, pocketable and beige, the volumes are now black, thick, and less handy. This may be the last print edition of the series. A digital version would expand the guides’ uses: and if you don’t have the right sort of imagination to visualise interiors or exteriors from written detail alone – I struggle ...”

“... he evidently never wore a wig – dressed in what appears to be his customary suit of solemn black, but with a plain, reddish-brown greatcoat. As Einberg puts it, he ‘eschews any aggrandisement of his own person, either by conventional gesture or dress’. There is, to borrow Hallett’s terms again, a striking combination of benevolence and especially ...”

“... to prevailing conventions took courage. In Boston, Daniell and Nicol became involved with Benjamin Tucker, an outspoken supporter of women’s emancipation and an ‘individualist anarchist’ (he argued for private property rather than common ownership). Daniell contributed stories and poems to his journal, Liberty; according to Rowbotham, the ...”

“... public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a crisis in his unhappy career. Browning annoys Jane Carlyle by putting a hot kettle down on her new carpet. Haydon takes his own life. So, from day to day and street to street, the sublime and the ridiculous appear in the proximity ...”

“... throughout A la recherche), engages the nature of his prose as well as his sentiments; as Walter Benjamin said, in one of the finest essays ever written on the novel, Proust’s language is inseparable from his ‘intransigent French spirit’. It is a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through Saint-Simon and ...”

“... How to be black in America was the challenge for spirited young men of colour who found their way to Harlem in the troubled years of the 1940s, when music, poetry, dance and art were giving way to drink, drugs, street crime and sex for money. Malcolm Little’s first impulse was to cut loose in the big city where he found himself soon after his 17th birthday in 1942 ...”

“... had large numbers of slaves. By mid-century about 40 per cent of population of Virginia was black. Who then bought the convicts? The answer seems to be middling planters who could not afford the increasingly expensive African slaves and who therefore were willing to accept even a convict in hope of obtaining seven years of hard labour in return for an ...”

“... family have for you,’ reads the typing primer; you can see it in cross-stitches, can’t you? Benjamin Franklin would be proud. ‘It’s easy to be clean on the outside,’ murmurs a demonic Shirley Temple in baggy shorts and lanyard. ‘All you need is soap and water and a scrubbing brush. It’s much harder to be clean on the inside.’ Among all this ...”

“... On the evening of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted ...”

“... on the Opry, is that, for all his musical talent, he was the exception that proved a rule: black folks were all right, in their place, just so long as that place was out of sight, at the back of the line. Burns also features Charley Pride: the first black regular of ‘Grand Ole Opry since DeFord Bailey decades ...”

“... daughter washing her hair in the kitchen sink. He opens the front door. A figure darts out: ‘black-skinned, woolly-hatted, zip-jacketed, jeaned, it ran past him to the road.’ This is Benjie, delinquent boyfriend of Catherine, Frank’s second eldest daughter. Catherine is ...”

“... ago the lavatory consisted of a sink, a hole in the floor, and an alcove whose wall was thick with black mould. When it was occupied, the patrons used the hall, which was, except for the sink and the hole, indistinguishable from the lavatory. This is one thing I remember about the pub; the other thing I remember is that the pub was called the Jesse ...”

“... artistic couple of any sexual stripe), as celebrated as the earlier musical duo Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, though they rigorously resist all efforts by the gay community to assimilate them. When Farson asked them for details of their sex life, George became vehement: ‘That’s part of a different story. Not part of the G–G story!’ And Gilbert ...”

“... Ginsberg led the others in this ring-a-roses with the grandees. They met Duchamp, Man Ray and Benjamin Péret at a party (fifty years before the selfie, Ginsberg snogged Duchamp). They ran into Tristan Tzara. Ginsberg and Burroughs paid a visit to Céline in the suburbs. They were greeted by his ferocious dogs (Burroughs must have liked that). Céline ...”