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“... to be played in an orchestral suite first performed in New York in 1915. When the Royal Festival Hall opened in 1951 it was complete with a light console, descended from these experiments. But we had to wait for the end of the century. Robert Wilson, designer/director of Philip Glass’s Monsters of Grace, ‘a digital opera in three dimensions’ which has ...”

“... in fact, Mary Beard herself, but some textual twin. The letter purports to have been sent from New Hall. Mary Beard, however, is at Newnham. Textual twins, avatars and the vicarious, are one of the book’s major themes. The medium is very definitely the message. Or take hard-case Hartmut, and his partner Heidi, from Heidelberg, an expert in church ...”

“... and the instability of reading. Dover sole is ordered and eaten for lunch (the distance of Pointz Hall from the sea vacillates); Giles thinks of himself as a fish in the stream, and, unnoticing, eats the ‘sole’; the old carp, as old almost as pre-history, occasionally rises to the surface of the pond. Ruotolo remarks that great writers disrupt ‘the ...”

“... never-never land of Peter Ackroyd’s English Music. He shares with Ackroyd a love of music-hall, or its wilder sibling, the Punch and Judy show. On one level, that is what A Perfect Execution is. An exhibition in a tent or a glass box at the end of the pier. Pantomime horror, like the female hanging that opens Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse ...”

“... is not very natural. The sentences refuse to lie down, and often he turns the page into a lecture hall. Even the best essay in the book, his fine celebration of Nabokov, has a kind of aural clatter: ‘I may also seem to be saying that if Lolita, the supreme novel of love in the 20th century, is a parody of earlier love novels, we should not be ...”

“... Recovery, a rope cinched tightly around her right ankle. She is defenceless and exposed. Captain John Kimber seems to be taking pleasure in her pain. He is corpulent, grotesque. We do not know the girl’s name. Nor did the crew who watched or assisted in her torture. They called one of her fellow captives Venus, which of course had no meaning in the village ...”

“... In Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, Dorothy Moore – a retired music-hall chanteuse and the wife of a moral philosopher called George Moore – is going dotty in her bedroom. The precipitating cause is a televised fight between the first two astronauts to land on the Moon about who gets to go back home on a damaged lunar ascent module that can carry only one ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”

“... My role involved sitting on a set of steps to one side of the stage in Silchester village hall, and reading out, from a primitive autocue – a series of large sheets of white cardboard, the text handwritten on them in thick felt-tip pen – the story of the first Christmas, as my contemporaries performed what I spoke. The most thrilling scene for me ...”

“... where the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not ...”

“... thing is that only the National Theatre audiences saw and were stunned by this performance. Though John Schlesinger later filmed the play (where HMQ was supported by her corgis) the magic didn’t quite transfer. But Pru was the first and the best. In the central scene of the play the queen has a long conversation with the keeper of the royal pictures, Sir ...”

“... is visiting Long Beach,’ she declared, urging the manager to hold a reception for King at City Hall. He refused: ‘He’s a troublemaker and we don’t want him here.’ This minor incident goes unmentioned in Jonathan Eig’s new biography of King, of course. But it illustrates a theme to which Eig returns several times. People of every political ...”

“... been brought up by her grandparents, both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused ...”

“... you whole again, a claim that Stephen must have seemed to epitomise as he strode back into Trinity Hall with a fresh Alp in his pocket; and Meredith would have warmly agreed. The climactic episode in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is a walk through the woods, a breezy aesthetic experience which marks the hero’s moral regeneration. (You are reminded of Irving ...”

“... Grover Cleveland. Her parents were married in Westminster Abbey and she grew up in Kirkleatham Old Hall near Middlesbrough, a house with sixteen bedrooms. In her social class, girls were simply not educated; Foot spent a lot of time riding, and was taught chiefly at home by governesses who, she said, ‘didn’t know anything’. But she determined to escape ...”