“... Carter Family, Morton Feldman, Beatrice Lillie (and fairies at the bottom of the garden), Elmore James, Giulio Cesare, Miss Kitty Wells, Vespro della beata vergine, South Pacific, Pet Sounds, Les Négresses Vertes, Dusty in Memphis, Ferrier’s Kindertötenlieder, Toots and the Maytals, Têtes Raides, Lulu, Lulu – even Gurdjieff’s potty piano ...”

“... Touch, Bloch’s study of the medieval belief, which in England persisted down to the time of James II, that the king could cure scrofula by laying hands on the sufferer – a puzzle in any modern retrospect. Today, few would question that Bloch was the greatest historian of his age, or that The Historian’s Craft remains unsurpassed as a reflection on ...”

“... meals proceeded from kitchen to dining room by miniature railway, they owned a London house in St James’s Square, a Highland estate on the island of Jura, and a 16-bedroom seaside ‘cottage’ at Sandwich in Kent. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their five children somehow found the time to live in all four; worried about the safety of Jura milk, Nancy had her ...”

“... as a developed perspective rather than a thwarted intuition, is a recent phenomenon. In 1988, James O’Connor, founding editor of the American journal Capital Nature Socialism, proposed that the ‘capital-nature relation’ is no less fundamental than the capital-labour relation in analysing how capitalism reproduces and, ultimately, undermines ...”

“... it leaves open whether it is Zoe’s own passivity or the heedless passers-by who are to blame.Peter, a young painter, turns up at her house. ‘For a moment she could not remember him. “The coffee bar,” he said. “You gave me your address. I promised to take you out, one afternoon in summer.”’ Zoe doesn’t remember, but goes with him to a ...”

“... be warned off, kept at bay. I desired the hitherto unattainable – to be left alone: what Henry James once described as ‘uncontested possession of the long, sweet, stupid day’: that peace to which no living creature has a natural right. Yes, for a time I was decidedly neurotic on the subject of my friends. I even imagined a kinship with Dorothy ...”

“... the absence of climate sceptics in high places; and the Cambridge associate professor of divinity James Orr, who has hosted both Jordan Peterson and the notorious peddler of race science Charles Murray at events for Trinity Forum Europe, a conservative Christian charity.These men, together with other right-wing academics, reportedly began meeting in Cambridge ...”

“... at some of the A-list names cropping up regularly in All We Know: Maude Adams (the first Peter Pan); the Russian film star Alla Nazimova (a teetering Salomé in the ultra-campy cinematic 1923 version of Wilde’s play); Isadora Duncan, the bisexual modern dancer; the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her Broadway-producer lover Bessie ...”

“... the Spectator: Ferdinand Mount, former aide to Thatcher, whose The New Few had appeared in 2012; Peter Oborne, whose Triumph of the Political Class was published five years earlier; and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, whose Yo, Blair! came out in 2007. The first looked at the structure of wealth that had emerged in the new century, the second at the character of its ...”

“... gym I belong to – became existential torture devices. No more Frasier reruns or baseball: just Peter Jennings and dirty bombs.The boys with tattoos flexed nervously. Even the female-to-male transsexuals looked shaken. (It’s a gay gym.) I went through my own quiet days feeling gusty, shocked and forlorn. Blakey was still in Chicago. One evening I broke ...”

“... in Walmer Road while Tilbury and PC Dave Pullan went to another temporary relief centre, Clement James in Treadgold Street. ‘Because we were in uniform,’ Rumble said, ‘we were seen as authority figures, but people wouldn’t have perceived us as having anything to do with the council. But we are council. I was inside the cordon and my team were there ...”

“... First Letter to the Corinthians, the passage about love, with Father Jolliffe opting for the King James version using charity. He took time at the start of the reading to explain to the congregation that charity was love and not anything to do with flag days or people in doorways. Or if it was to do with people in doorways that was only one of its ...”

“... There the British had conquered an area larger than UP, most of it composed of the far end of what James Scott has described as the Appalachia of South-East Asia: densely forested mountainous uplands inhabited by tribal peoples of Tibeto-Mongoloid origin untouched by Hinduism, with no historical connection to any subcontinental polity. In the valleys, three ...”