“... early, so that by 12.45 I’m back home. It’s a model service, today’s radiographer a bearded young man who asks about Allelujah!, and shows me the screen and how he measures the width of my (quite small) aneurysms. Good young medics always cheer me and offer hope, not for my future but for the world in general.19 ...”

“... bank of benches at one side of the space, it turned out that these figures were not as dead as the young male corpse in black, set apart from the others, might have feared or hoped. Selectively revived in turns by a sort of black mass (performed by a coven of witches evidently visiting from Dunsinane), the cast of Hamlet were compelled once more to enact the ...”

“... strongly reminiscent of that child’s life of Raphael which made such an impression on the young Sartre. Here, for example, is Penrose’s description of Picasso and his father arriving in Barcelona in 1895: ‘The distinguished, middle-aged man, slightly stooping, had a look of disillusionment, a sad resignation, whereas the small heir to his fading ...”

“... and set the second half of his dialogues On the Ends of Good and Evil in the family library of his young friend Lucullus, which he hoped would equip the boy for public life. Medieval monks were fervent bibliophiles. In their cupboards, worn, faded manuscripts of the Latin classics and the Church Fathers flanked brand new Bibles and commentaries, beautifully ...”

“... are those who will never be able to bring themselves, even under the threat of Reagan, to want Edward Kennedy as President. Mosley did appreciate the existence, though not the nature, of the human craving to believe something. What he really offered to meet, though, was different: the human craving to believe in someone. (Not the satisfaction which looks ...”

“... here Gordimer forecloses any discussion by making the speaker a ludicrous cameo character – a young English journalist ‘in a catfish-patterned dashiki’, whose motives for bringing up the subject of ANC detention camps are suspect. Gordimer’s books often unstitch their own politics in this way and, as derision of one thing becomes extenuation of ...”

“... at that time, even more so for one from the depths of the country. St Ita’s was a place where young ladies visited museums in school hours, held classes in the garden and immersed themselves in Ireland’s Celtic culture. The girls there read Yeats and Synge as contemporary writers and steeped themselves in the myths and folklore of ancient Ireland. Above ...”

“... had ceased for ever. In the days before Hollywood sequels Jane Austen enthralled her young relations by telling them what every reader wants to know: what happens after the book’s last page, or play’s last scene? It’s unusual to have so close a glimpse of the offstage author spinning consequences (and since Austen was only entertaining her ...”

“... within months of each other in 1917; finally her unheroic, musical, stubborn little brother, Edward, was shot in the hills above Vicenza in June 1918. Brittain also returned to Oxford in 1919, ‘a ghost too dazed to feel the full fury of her own resentment’ as she put it. She found herself plagued by the illusion of a witch’s beard sprouting on her ...”

“... Thames Estuary, a night ship on a dark sea. Here, too, in a run, are paintings of another order: a young woman crouching under a bridge, beside a river, conducting some ritual of recovery or loss. A dark window in the kind of building that is now being demolished to make way for brownfield development. A woman’s face peering out. This, Matthews reveals in ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... allies. England recognised John IV and the toddler Catherine was suggested as a bride for the young Prince Charles. But England was on the brink of its own wars, and soon Charles I would be tried and executed. During the period of England’s republic, Portugal tried to remain neutral, keen to keep trading with England and keep a fellow enemy of Spain on ...”

“... drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in the hospital for many years. He was incontinent and unable to speak clearly. He drew vigorously on the ...”

“... suite for solo piano, Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus. The performer was Yvonne Loriod, a young pianist who would later become Messiaen’s wife. Reciting texts infused with Catholic mysticism after each movement, Messiaen struck the critic Bernard Gavoty as a ‘lunatic curator of a vanished museum’; Poulenc described his followers, the so-called ...”

“... designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at it. Mrs Nelson had been the Catholic residents’ legal representative in their efforts to stop the annual Drumcree march from coming down the Garvaghy Road. She was also ...”