“... with ‘the bright feathers of her dignity clinging to his lips’.No one else in her family is held captive to the portal. They orbit around her, IRL; each morning she bids them farewell, passing through a wardrobe into ‘the blizzard of everything’. When the book begins, the narrator is already famous for a tweet that went viral: ‘Can a dog be ...”

“... where such things are more likely to occur. (Two modern editions of the Requiem – those of David Wulstan and Bruno Turner – try to correct the offending octaves in the Benedictus but in doing so introduce two sets of consecutive fifths. It would have been better to leave Victoria with his momentary slip, as Rees does in his new online edition of the ...”

“... with enthusiasm in 1984-85, as more rough and ready activists, reminiscent of the ‘denims’ in David Peace’s miners’ strike novel, GB84. But Gildea’s history of community mobilisation challenges the Conservatives’ depiction of unionised miners as a threat to democracy, Thatcher’s ‘enemy within’.Raymond Williams thought that the ...”

“... across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix to Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine described the way his father, who had been stationed overseas during World War Two, ‘talked endlessly about India’. Unlike Hall and Cannadine, Bernard Porter remembered the empire coming up rarely during his childhood – no family connections ...”

“... later, we trudged through the rain and the cold to the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held. The guide, well-informed and energetic, told us that some industrial magnates who thought they could control Hitler had attended the conference, at which the implementation of the Final Solution was discussed. Whether or not the regime in the US is best ...”

“... was his gimmick, the thing that made him different. He never wore a tie. It could also be what held him back, kept him out on the race-courses in all weathers. He looked after his family, forged a workable alliance with the Jewish teams in the East End; an admirable man in many ways. Yet he has slipped from public consciousness (if you exclude being one of ...”

“... a complicated distribution debacle led to another cull in 1957. Even then, those laid off rarely held it against Lee personally.The comics were strictly product, however. When Kirby and Simon started having hits with romance titles published elsewhere, Goodman ordered Lee to follow suit. Imitative cycles of horror, western and giant monster comics followed ...”

“... David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables in this country: those accused of committing a crime. It will strip away safeguards that have taken centuries to accrue, and alienate criminal suspects further from society as a whole ...”

“... when they landed in Ireland, a public rhetoric soon developed in which the Irish and the Jews were held to have a great deal in common: Ireland had never persecuted the Jews, not just because it didn’t let them in, as Mr Deasy says in Ulysses, but because of an Act of Grattan’s Parliament in 1796, four years before the Act of Union, which allowed ...”

“... Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce. Rajapaksa’s remark was in one sense a tribute to how Kouchner has changed the world. It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist ...”

“... their patchy intonation. Elgar, Adrian Boult, Henry Wood, Thomas Beecham: the gentleman-conductors held sway, stiff and upholstered on the podium, their white moustaches like frozen waterfalls, their batons cocked like riding crops. Elgar famously told the teenaged Yehudi Menuhin, who was about to record his Violin Concerto under the composer’s ...”

“... and natural history within a ‘big history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to ...”

“... about how to use Milner in our daily lives: Emilia Halton-Hernandez’s The Marion Milner Method, David Russell’s Marion Milner: On Creativity and Akshi Singh’s In Defence of Leisure, forthcoming this spring, which is described as a book about ‘experiments in living with Marion Milner’. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of these books ...”

“... char-acter roles if he’d allowed himself to play them. And I think he still wanted to but was held back, as he’d been all his life, by too strong a sense of self-preservation. 29 May. A biker delivers some proofs from PFD, and as I’m signing for them, asks what’s my opinion of Cyril Connolly and why is it he’s less well thought of ...”

“... of the lobby are under an obligation to keep secret the fact that such meetings are held and to avoid revealing the sources of their information.’Younger members chafed, of course. The etiquette seemed to us as medieval as the Groom of the Stole. We itched for a more open dialogue, in which statements would be on the record and the speakers ...”