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“... For those too young – or too old – to remember, Mandy Rice-Davies had a walk-on part in the Great Profumo Scandal of 1963. Now she has published a racily ghosted autobiography. It says nothing of much interest about anything or anybody that matters, and paints the predictable sympathetic picture of a fun-loving girl more sinned against than sinning ...”

“... a period of ten years, why weren’t they investigated sooner? A former student at the school, Stephen, who was cast in a Scarlett ballet in 2017, told me he and other male students had been warned by a principal dancer of the company: ‘Watch out for Liam.’ He claims that ‘everyone knew’ that Scarlett behaved inappropriately with students at the ...”

“... recognisably connected with the minimalist and process music of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young and others. In Europe, on the other hand, he was famous almost exclusively for his operas: the most recent two had been commissioned in the Netherlands and Stuttgart, and all three had been premiered in Europe. His background was largely unknown.This was ...”

“... and in some cases their diaries or memoirs. We know that Berlioz was cordial and complimentary to young Brahms when he played his E flat minor piano scherzo at Brendel’s in Leipzig, because Brahms wrote to Joachim and told him so. We know (or thought we knew: Macdonald casts doubt on the story) that Brahms fell asleep during Liszt’s playing of his B minor ...”

“... more effectively be felt to struggle for breath. The author’s humane values are looked after by Stephen Lewis, celebrated children’s book writer and member of the Parmenter Sub-Committee on Reading and Writing, one of 14 committees detailed to report back to the Official Commission on Childcare, ‘known to be a pet concern of the Prime ...”

“... informative note, a detail of local colour which makes the opening action almost unintelligible. Young Elliott first makes friends with the Extra-Terrestrial, and revives him from incipient exhaustion, by laying a trail of ‘M&Ms’ from the forest to the backyard. ‘The great M&Ms have given me my vitality back,’ comments E.T., in interior ...”

“... The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan Carl Mathews’s ‘Severances’, and John Levett’s ‘The Photographs of Paris’. The first two are longish, the others shorter. The only one that won a prize – and that the smallest, £100 – is ‘Corolla’, a sequence of nine exactly rhymed and metred sonnets, culminating in a stunning version of the Ronsard sonnet that defeated Yeats: When you are old and lost in memory you might, seized by a sentimental fit, take down this book and blow the dust off it recalling: ‘Bosley was quite keen on me ...”

“... Sarah was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking about me when she spoke of a young man who had just lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show. I took this to mean the PM had given the order to sink the Belgrano. But Mr Pym was speaking in a different context. Paul Daniels, who was also a ...”

“... drinking and listening to music ... I drain my glass and take the phones off. Behind me sits Stephen Sinclair on the lazy chair. He was crashed out with drink and drugs. I sit and look at him. I stand up and approach him. My heart is pounding. I kneel down in front of him. I touch his leg and say: ‘Are you awake?’ There is no response. ‘Oh ...”

“... place despite the potent opposition of Oswald’s sisters-in-law, who were caring for Andrew and Stephen. Elsa insisted on being called ‘mummy’. ‘Never call that German woman what you called your own mother,’ an aunt had insisted. Guilt and treachery thus informed the children’s first dealings with their stepmother, complicated by bewilderment at ...”

“... alarmed, intrigued and moved; responding to her terrible cries in the night, they assigned her a young companion, Bartolomea Crivelli, who was to share her cell, observe her, and provide assistance if possible. When on the second Friday of Lent, 1618, in the middle of the night, Jesus Christ visited Benedetta and spoke to her, Bartolomea heard the voices and ...”

“... In publishing his compendious work Metahistory in 1973, Hayden White gave currency both to a term and to a programme. His subtitle, ‘The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century Europe’, indicated the broad area of his investigations, but gave little sense of the radical originality of this programme, which was quite simply the re-examination of historiography in its written form ...”

“... sons, Adam Idriss, a colonel in the Presidential Guard. I met the soft-spoken, almost shy young man in his sitting room, where he was alone in front of a giant flat-screen TV, the sole source of lighting. We spoke about the help he’d given to a colleague, allowing him to travel embedded with the Chadian army as it fought in northern Mali – a ...”

“... it’s because that’s what it was: reactionary in the best and purest sense of the word. A young French journalist, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, wrote in Le Monde, as the draft moved towards finality: ‘Our parliamentarians at Strasbourg are playing at being lawyers from 1789 and liberals from the 19th century.’ It is time’s whirligig which in ...”

“... database, research grant and exclusive access to the subject’s papers. In the first a young Negro of high intelligence, great physical strength and grace, musically talented and gifted with a resonant bass voice, is induced by a dominant white culture to fill various roles – social, professional and indeed dramatic – formulated for blacks to ...”