“... face, it was said, would rubberise itself into the shape of the spirit, who was, at various times, Lord Kitchener, Jack London or Franz Liszt (he came to tell the children to practise their instruments more frequently). But the barmy, scrambled upbringing wasn’t always innocent or even well-intentioned. Although Barnes later said that she loved her ...”

“... Sol Kerzner, the multi-millionaire hotel/casino king (who was paying for the bash). Kerzner, the lord of Sun City and the Lost City, has now left the country amid a welter of long-standing but recently revived bribery and corruption charges. If at any previous point one had suggested that Slovo would cheerfully make his peace with casino-capitalism, the ...”

“... the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous crowds. Activists among the country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some ...”

“... start to a new phase. The Hobbit leads to other stories set in entirely different worlds – The Lord of the Rings; Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, in which magical power is held by those who know the true names of things – but also to the ‘books I loved best . . . the ones that started in this world and took you to another’. He credits E. Nesbit ...”

“... seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the service of Queen and country, was one of his favourite books. When Kennedy was about to run for the Senate, according to Dallek, he ‘reluctantly’ decided ...”

“... the congregants. ‘A-men!’ they shout; ‘That’s right!’; ‘Yes, sir!’; ‘Oh, my sweet lord!’; ‘Unh-hunh!’; ‘Yeah!’; ‘It’s all right!’; ‘Hallelujah!’ The antiphonal responses allow the preacher to pause for breath and thought, and, from my one experience in the pulpit of such a church, during a mayoral election in Memphis in ...”

“... for their sound. Hawkers were the voice of many cities – the travel writer and historian James Howell advised 17th-century tourists on the continent to keep their windows open when lodging at an urban inn so that they could hear the cries of the town and better understand how it worked and the language its people spoke. Samuel Pepys, not averse to a ...”

“... rather more than two hundred years after Pope, the distinguished editor of the Twickenham Dunciad, James Sutherland, declined to take the poet at his word, and added a note on the annotation explaining that the name ‘really was pronounced’ Theobald. Presumably following this lead, an equally distinguished Popian, Maynard Mack, has now in his long-awaited ...”

“... the same passport round here. There were forty to fifty people. Seven hundred cheered a drunken [James] Dickey some months before. I didn’t go to the reception.McGahern was amused by many things and people. There was no telephone in the house in Leitrim on my first visit (‘I’m uneasy on the phone,’ he wrote in 1998. ‘I think it comes from having to ...”

“... they passed for brother and sister; and when Pharaoh took the fair Sarai into his house, ‘the Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai Abram’s wife’ (Genesis 12:17). What this parallel means isn’t clear – it makes most sense as an ironic way of registering the difference between modernity and biblical antiquity ...”

“... separate speeches. The King is ordering Hubert to dispose of the young Prince Arthur: ‘Death./My lord?/A grave./He shall not live.’ And the Bastard Falconbridge is, interestingly, given the job of deflating pretension and excess of much the same kind I’ve illustrated. Soon it will be heard no more. However, the truly vital change was to come later. It ...”

“... names,’ Amis confides at one point, ‘it’s amazing how it lowers . . . the tone’ (Lord David ‘Cess-hole’, for example). Getting the tone down to sewer-level became an end in itself, with much verbal japing along the way: ‘Fucky Nell’, ‘a bit of an R-scrawler’ and so on. Above all, the Amis-Larkin correspondence was an abattoir ...”

“... from producers and strand editors to the controller and five commissioners. In the same period, James Boyle, Radio Four’s controller, had undertaken the dangerous procedure of restructuring his channel’s slots, which reduced the weekly 90-minute play to 60 minutes (at the same time moving it from Monday to Friday) and rationalised the daytime drama ...”

“... Kenneth Jones, the trial judge, had suggested 12 years for McCluskie and his co-defendant. The Lord Chief Justice thought that nine to ten ‘would not be inappropriate’, but the then Home Secretary overruled the senior judge and agreed with Jones. The Home Secretary’s powers in these kinds of case derive from the Children and Young Persons Act of ...”

“... a supposedly neutral Ireland during the Second World War, fully reported to the British Cabinet by Lord Cranborne in February 1945, which included provision for British command of both Irish and British forces in the event of a German invasion.) Among these papers there are a number of reports from two envoys of the Dáil to Irish America in 1922, Professor ...”