“... Treatments improve, but no cure is in sight. Bacteria remain just as alarming. In 1969, William Stewart, the US surgeon general, believed we could soon ‘close the book on infectious diseases’. But overuse of antibacterial agents helped to promote resistance to antibiotics, leading to today’s multiresistant bacteria, the superbugs of newspaper ...”

“... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...”

“... of the narrator’s youth. She has memories of concerts by David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart, and of Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1987. The protagonist of Donoso’s 1986 novel, Curfew, is based on Víctor Jara, the Chilean protest singer and poet who was among those killed at the stadium. The character in ...”

“... There are less unexpected points in the other essays and it is a pity that one of them claims John Knox as the father of Scottish Presbyterianism, and another contrasts ‘history’ with ‘herstory’. Points can be made without insulting the English language. From Glasgow Presbytery in 1960 comes a remark on women’s ordination: ‘every religion ...”

“... difference. Thus he describes how the Scottish head of the Central School in Hong Kong, Frederick Stewart, endeavoured to create a system combining Scottish and Chinese forms of education, foiling in the process the ‘English Governor, Sir John Pope Hennessy, who wanted to impose a Western curriculum’. But Pope Hennessy ...”

“... Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”

“... of a story in the first-ever children’s periodical, the Lilliputian Magazine, brought out by John Newbery in 1751, and with its theme of character-moulding (a silly little girl is cured of vanity through suffering a fright) it set the tone for a good deal of juvenile magazine fiction for some time. Right up until the 1930s and Forties, characters in the ...”

“... on one thing. Democracy was the enemy of civilisation. Thus, as elegantly described here by Robert Stewart, he could denounce Disraeli from the right over Reform questions, and recast Disraelian cynicism as collaborationist weakness. Any concession to the modish idea of democracy was disastrous in Salisbury’s eyes and many of these essays help us see the ...”

“... Ballroom in Harlem, could be as perceptive in judging future talent, when it came their way, as John Hammond, the greatest of the talent scouts of the decade, though they ranged less widely. What the Left did was – deliberately and successfully – to bring black music out of the ghetto by mobilising that curious combination of radical Jews and ...”

“... we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John Bird, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall: we were all such boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in ...”

“... made would be ‘an explosion in the heart of the commodity’, to borrow a phrase from Mark Stewart, the singer in the post-punk outfit the Pop Group and in the years before punk a regular visitor to the King’s Road store. A few years earlier, around the time McLaren and Westwood were starting out in youth fashion, the urban guerrillas of the Angry ...”

“... not unprecedented: what really distinguished Gray’s epic postmodernism from the work of, say, John Fowles or Thomas Pynchon was the absolute lucidity of his approach. Lanark was – and remains – intensely readable, combining the narrative hooks of science fiction with the solid satisfactions of the Victorian novel: read the first chapter of Lanark, in ...”

“... sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and then lost her marbles to be given an entirely fair trial for at least another ...”

“... minister, I’ll never again be as great as I was at Winchester.’ ‘Dick’ is immortalised by John Betjeman: Broad of Church and Broad of Mind, Broad Before and Broad Behind. ‘Dick’ competes with Auden for the affections of a rugby-player – I cherish this bit because years later, in a villainous wine-bar called the Bung Hole, Crossman told a group ...”

“... other community. Ulster is, and remains, a collage of confessional territories. As the late A.T.Q. Stewart remarked in his history of Ulster, The Narrow Ground (1977), every resident of the province carries around in his or her head a complex and detailed geography: they know which villages or streets are Protestant or Catholic, or mixed. These internalised ...”