“... somewhat belatedly, they did Leslie Stephen. (He eventually resigned his fellowship at Trinity Hall, and we now learn that he may have been brought near to suicide.) Not that life was always so thrilling; Stephen, in fact, found Cambridge dull. ‘The only persons I thoroughly liked were Jebb the public orator and Mrs Jebb,’ he wrote later: ‘but Mrs ...”

“... she seems to mimic her. Charlotte Mew may have grown up to be secretive – she was certainly no party-goer – but she wrote quite freely about her childhood, directly in prose, obliquely in her poems. She enjoyed nursery life: in some ways she never got over it. ‘I like you best when you are small,’ says a would-be lover, in her poem ‘On the Road ...”

“... mock modesty but a true representation of how he sees himself and chooses to be seen by others – no ordinary chemist, mind you, but the supremo of British chemistry for very many years and a figure of world rank as well. He is a Nobel Laureate and a peer and has been President of the Royal Society and the Head of a Cambridge College; he has earned, too, what ...”

“... Jack Kerouac began shouting ‘GO’ in cadence as Allen read it. In spite of all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before – we had gone beyond a point of no return – and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. Ginsberg himself was in tears, ‘driving ...”

“... and urban regeneration, derives in one way or another from the TV programmes, but there are no photographs or screenshots. Some of the pieces look like composites, and there is a lot of repetition. No matter: it’s a joy to read. What Meades does most often is praise things, especially things that are habitually ...”

“... to be one of the most widely photographed spacecrafts in history,’ Armstrong said. ‘That was no doubt due to the fact it was so photogenic. Its true beauty, however, was that it worked. It was tough, reliable and almost cuddly.’ In front of Aldrin is his shadow, a set of footprints, and part of one of the lunar module’s four footpads wrapped in ...”

“... first writer in Scots who can legitimately be called a ‘Court poet’. The Scottish kings had no great tradition of encouraging literary patronage, and indeed for much of Dunbar’s career at James IV’s Court his main employment was probably as a secretary. He first appears in Court records in 1500. What can be gleaned of his life before that is ...”

“... at the top. The king, according to Gilbert Burnet, Rochester’s deathbed confessor, ‘thought no man sincere, nor woman honest, out of principle’, and dealt with his subordinates in that light – dissembling, manipulating, ‘hearing every body against any body’. Personality necessarily became something performed, unstable. Burnet wrote that Charles ...”

“... all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the ...”

“... so thin and distracted that the registrar asked if he was a minor, to which Helen replied: ‘No, he’s an art student.’ The tone of their long, complicated but fundmentally happy marriage was set. There was no money but, in another of those magnificent gestures that make the reader want to spring to the defence of ...”

“... excluded from the opera. A majestic outdoors, the forest, and a vast sanctified indoors, the Grail Hall, are its two positive locations (the negative ones, Klingsor’s domain, being a castle tower and a garden of dangerous flowers). To be sure, Act One has water just offstage:a lake to which the wounded king is brought for his hydrotherapy, and a spring where ...”

“... only … do not fire at any person,’ were shot directly into the crowds. It’s amazing no one was killed. In the days afterwards, police raided the homes of suspected participants, dragging out men and beating them, yelling racist slurs and arresting or intimidating anyone who protested. The Tory government and right-wing press declared that the ...”

“... concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses ...”

“... are not pursued with the fervour they once were by the organs of the right: the Telegraph no longer runs a ‘Beebwatch’ column, and though the tabloids lambast the BBC’s attempts at diversity, few have recently campaigned for its privatisation.Such grumblings have been displaced by two interrelated arguments: first, that the licence fee is ...”

“... Bristol Omnibus Company to accept Black conductors.Nelson told me, however, that ‘there’s been no organised right of any size in Bristol.’ When the English Defence League held a march through the city in July 2012, only three hundred people took part, one of the smallest of the group’s protests. Reform has ...”