“... played the Allegro Cantabile from Hermann’s Cello Concerto at Kennedy’s book launch in Wigmore Hall, where Hermann himself had played almost a century before. Corrie, who was at the event, said: ‘The cello being played [here] now makes the circle round.’ Five months later she told her father’s story at the European Parliament, where again Lucas ...”

“... I appear to be bitching out the primate of Rome.Afterwards​ Hope and I walk through another hall of human heads. The air inside the Vatican Museums is a whisper, of inside information, yes, of history, yes, but even more of that alternate reality, the parallel track that when you enter it carries you alongside life. ‘Small dick equals big ...”

“... in its favourite predilection by describing him as a ‘reformer’ (the BBC correspondent John Simpson predicted that he would mark a break with the ‘stern’ Hu, and speculated about the possibility of an elected parliament). Instead, all prospect of a more open political environment has receded. Dissidence is rare and often treated as treason. Liu ...”

“... I want to read books about schizophrenia, especially Laing’s books and the books from Kingsley Hall.’ Yeah, fine, if you must, whatever. ‘Now I’m two people.’ Oh, OK.The art world loved The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, and it’s easy to see why. There’s such energy and humour in the way it cuts and jumps between textual realities, the ...”

“... and Lesbian Centre. (Margaret Thatcher may be impossible to displace as a totem of oppression, but John Major has been prime minister for a couple of years by the time the book begins.) The only actual gay character in the book, if you exclude the passing dreamboat in his van, is Chickie Jamieson, an elderly, unthreatening and neuter-seeming neighbour of the ...”

“... when the world was full of vocalists who belted out songs to the back of the hall. An old-school jazz fan like Sinatra, he worshipped Louis Armstrong and closely studied Satchmo’s self-presentation and singular way with a tune. Crosby’s delivery was ‘cool’ in a way that was entirely new to the mainstream, studded with jazz tics ...”

“... his trial for murder, became a particular rallying point. In 1974, Hutchings shot and killed John Pat Cunningham, a 27-year-old man with severe learning difficulties, as he ran away from an army patrol. Johnny Mercer, the veterans’ affairs minister who led the campaign to protect former soldiers, described the passage of the Troubles Legacy Act last ...”

“... defending his right to say it. Ahmed is clearly a fan. After Peterson’s lecture at Lady Mitchell Hall in 2021 – during which he quipped that ‘educated women’ were ‘very annoying’ – Ahmed described it as ‘a brilliant talk from which we’ve all learned so much’, and presented Peterson with a first edition of Darwin’s Descent of Man and ...”

“... with the little monkey caps to the right and they could watch the revolving door, the entrance hall, and the desk. Turning the monkey caps to the left they could see the lobby, part of the bar, and most of the green salon beyond it. Before their noses were the stairs, the two elevators, and the telephone booths … These spies told the police what people ...”

“... the only person mostly missing from the intimate cavalcade of biddable and beddable is Radclyffe Hall, author of the notorious lesbian tear-jerker The Well of Loneliness (1928). But even she makes oblique appearances. De Acosta was wont to describe Garland’s stone-butch girlfriend of the 1920s, the hatchet-faced Dorothy (‘Dody’) Todd, pioneering editor ...”

“... still a senator, he ran for mayor of São Paulo. Posing over-confidently for photographers in City Hall on the eve of the polls, he provoked a reaction and lost. The next year, however, there were new congressional elections. By now the omnibus party of which he had become a fixture, the PMDB, was no longer in opposition: it was the official base of President ...”

“... a sartorial victory for his class during an exchange of words with Jacqueline Kennedy in the hall of the spectacularly grand Manhattan apartment to which she moved after her husband’s assassination. They had become friendly in the course of earlier meetings, once at a state dinner in the White House and another time, while she was still First Lady, at ...”

“... the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) and in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to ...”

“... in his London flat. For nearly three months the newlyweds had to sleep separately, one in the hall, the other in a pantry; Russell, when he was in town, occupied the one bedroom. Eliot assured the supposedly anxious Russell that he should have no hesitation about remaining in the flat alone with Vivienne on the increasingly frequent occasions when Eliot ...”

“... and the peek-a-boo portrait of himself! How cunning of Harvard to market the Arcades as another John Grisham or The Jewel in the Crown.) I do not recommend my reading tactic to others. This is a book for moving about in, lightly and irresponsibly and, above all, fast. Benjamin seems to have dreamed of a final, rapid-fire, cinematic delivery, accelerating to ...”