“... age or incapacity, and so the show went on through the Great War. One of the earliest sketches to lodge in the memory of lifelong fans was a skit about the Emperor Napoleon called I’ll Say She Is! Its mode is runaway farce, a pastiche without a prayer for logic, and any sample suggests about as much as any other: ‘Our just is cause. We cannot lose. I am ...”

“... side, a large pond is intended to compensate the Thames’s fish for the imposition: a Swedish eco-lodge in the middle of Gotham. The idea of building tunnels under the city to connect stations on its outskirts via the centre has its origins in the town planner Patrick Abercrombie’s utopian plans for postwar London. For Abercrombie, the Blitz had created an ...”

“... tasty to me then, more so than the stewing steak we had regularly, as Dad was a butcher at Armley Lodge Road Co-op. He was either very scrupulous or quite timid, so we never had more than the ration, the meat always overcooked and never the grander cuts. The first proper steak I had was in the army in Cambridge when I was 18 and which shocked me as it was ...”

“... These include local Labour and Tory MPs. One man, however, makes no protest: the paid informer David Bertlestein, source of several scandalous allegations against Stalker, who died of a heart attack in Preston prison in March 1985. Asked after his reinstatement about the strange circumstances surrounding his case, John Stalker is understandably ...”

“... letter, ‘will for ever stick in my mind.’ Removed from Brixton, McCluskie went to Littleheath Lodge Remand Centre, where he was seen by Dr P. T. d’Orban, a consultant psychiatrist from the Royal Free Hospital. It is in the summary of Dr d’Orban’s pretrial report that one first finds anything like a favourable comment on McCluskie, anything to ...”

“... allowed the young to stay at home longer: meanwhile the lure of urban work brought other kin to lodge with their relatives in the town. All these forces combined to enlarge household size and alter its structure. By contrast, P. Schmidtbauer here shows that in some parts of Austria the presence of outlier kin diminished sharply with industrialisation. This ...”

“... one victim into reviving an obsolete Scots word – ‘to sorn’ was ‘to come for supper and lodge for a month’. Henderson’s vision, so Neat observes, was of a resurgent Scotland leading ‘the way towards the democratisation of the whole British Empire’. He appears already to have had that goal in mind as he travelled south to read modern ...”

“... rolling barrels. My father was ill and out of work and he and my mother brought this card to the lodge at the brewery gates, where I was sent for from the cellars. They weren’t sure what a first was. ‘Does it mean you’ve come top?’ asked my mother, not particularly surprised as from their point of view that’s what I’d always done ever since ...”

“... I recalled, the house invisible from the road, its presence marked only by a dilapidated octagonal lodge beside rusty gates. Who knew what relics of its former chatelaine’s Shakespearean activities the place might conceal? An unaccustomed peep into Debrett’s Peerage revealed that Christ Church, the Oxford college to which I was then attached, was the one ...”

“... to know the undergraduates, not least through parties he and Susan threw in the Provost’s Lodge. Sussex had welcomed women students from the outset, but at Worcester it took three years of tactful persuasion before the college accepted the inevitable in 1979. Briggs thought the hesitation ridiculous, but didn’t force the change through. It should be ...”

“... Association, which had its windows smashed. But there was also indiscriminate looting along Lodge Lane, where many businesses were locally owned; this was blamed by locals on white outsiders, but the claim is impossible to prove. It’s clear that the thrill of turning the normal order upside down was intoxicating; one participant, recalling the events ...”

“... some sense intrusive in wishing that they did.The marriage fell apart in the summer of 1962 when David Wevill, a Canadian poet whose work Hughes admired, and his wife, Assia, visited Court Green, the house in Devon where Hughes, Plath and their two young children were living. The Wevills stayed over the weekend of 18 to 20 May, and it was during this visit ...”

“... of the fulminating don, gown rippling and ermine bristling, as he charges past the porter’s lodge to have a go at someone.As he explains in his preface to Look Back in Laughter, Johnson returned home to South Africa in the 1990s (the book ends with some reflections on the post-apartheid state). Having made the decision to go back – and there’s much ...”

“... as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was by then at work on, Mays outlined in a 1996 lecture what he meant by his title, ‘Coleridge’s ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”