“... illusionistic feats that kept the magician-showmen Maskelyne and Cooke in business at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, for many years. Spiritualism also had affinities with Theosophy (and the ineffable Madame Blavatsky, into whose arcane orbit a handful of spiritualists wandered, only to be violently repelled). On the other hand, an outgrowth of early ...”

“... the broken windows ... and the rain coming through the roof’ to Caroline Blackwood’s Dunmartin Hall (in Great Granny Webster), with puddles in the corridors and warped doors, the Anglo-Irish house has characteristically fallen a victim to disrepair. There are, of course, a good many symbolic points to be adduced from this. McCormack goes to some lengths to ...”

“... the resources of the Empire in the national interest, they ran it as a branch of Toynbee Hall. Instead of adapting the educational system to fit the requirements of a nation competing for markets, they indulged in the fraudulent exercise, much trumpeted by Classics dons, of liberal humanism for the masses. Part One of the Barnett Report dealt with ...”

“... hear the words. But music in such a mood could not, I think, encourage mugging or bar-room, dance-hall brawls, as rock music can – not unless the rhythm, the beat, is changed, to parody the original. Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange pretended that a lively-eared punk could be turned on to street violence by Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’: but plain readers ...”

“... Club, Conservative Central Office, Daily Mail leader writer). He escorted Elizabeth to Pakenham Hall and Dunsany Castle, home of Uncle Eddie (‘Lord Insany’). The courtship, though beset by difficulties, was virtuous; once, invited by hosts to share a room, they resorted to ‘bundling’, with a bolster down the middle of the bed. At last came a good ...”

“... to the defence of the threatened mainstream, which sounds a bit like a call to defend Elton John or MTV. Either Paterson’s mainstream poets were not as middle of the road as his name for them suggested, or the threat levels were being artificially hiked up. The Iraq invasion was taking place at the time and angry avant-gardists quickly drew the ...”

“... half a million Londoners every day by 1910. It was not the biggest chain in Victorian England. John Pearce started off with a coffee stall on the corner of East Road and City Road and by the 1890s had 46 refreshment rooms, 14 with hotels attached. Pearce & Plenty mostly catered for poor workers with ‘large appetites but small means’ as the Caterer put ...”

“... to possession of my fantasy library. Some of the books were hard going – I never got on with Hall Caine or Jeffery Farnol – but there was enough enjoyable reading there to keep me busy for quite a while. A couple of years later, a generous Welsh bibliophile my parents knew gave me the first forty volumes of the Edinburgh Review, along with Foxe’s ...”

“... was assassinated. A few months later white paramilitaries smashed their way into the negotiating hall and roughed up the delegates when they heard that the proposal of a white volkstaat had been rejected. Coalitions were formed among various factions in order to stage a walk-out, and those who remained had to address the real possibility that many of the ...”

“... perhaps the most like Grendel’s arm after Beowulf tears it off and hangs it up in Hrothgar’s hall: huge, a bit of a mess, and, in its vastness, terrifying to contemplate. The earliest discussions call this kind of verse ‘melic’ (the Greek melos means ‘song’), and roughly distinguish sung poems from epic and tragedy. Aristotle, who had a strong ...”

“... decrypts poured in from Bletchley, to be mulled over by a team including the legendary Admiral Hall, whose Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the ...”

“... have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction of the aspiring middle classes into primrose leagues. It was all in Bagehot anyway. Similarly it is striking, but in some ways rather pathetic, to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan ...”

“... J.P. Gell was dispatched in 1839 to start up the interdenominational Christ’s College at Hobart; John Buckland followed in 1846 to be headmaster of the Hutchins School. In his uncertainties over employment Clough kept open the antipodean possibility, making an unsuccessful application for a chair of Classics at Sydney in 1851. J.A. Froude, after the ritual ...”

“... College of Art on a scholarship. After working in the kitchen at the newly opened Royal Festival Hall in 1951 – he’d begun by mopping floors but was soon roped into skinning a heap of sole – he came up with the idea of drawing recipes as cartoon strips. At first these were for personal use only – he didn’t want to spoil his ‘expensive ...”

“... by the warmth of Rousseau’s gratitude, and Rousseau was briefly exquisitely happy with Wootton Hall in Staffordshire, rented to him by Richard Davenport for a pittance. Then he took it into his head that Hume was mocking him behind his back; he also decided that Hume had been subsidising his stay in England, and of all the things calculated to render ...”