“... music publishers; in November, two weeks before he died, he began lessons in counterpoint with Simon Sechter, Vienna’s acknowledged specialist. He didn’t expect to die just yet.Few young composers can have had more formidable precursors, oppressively close in time and place. Vienna was the city of Mozart (who had died five years before Schubert was ...”

“... belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had forced Tsvetaeva’s husband to work for the GPU’. Kenneth prefers the Midwest because ‘that’s where the ...”

“... Hellman accepts the offer. All then is giddy alacrity. Like Jane Eyre setting off for Thornfield Hall, or the excitable governess departing for Bly at the opening of The Turn of the Screw, Mahoney promptly leaves her parents’ house in dreary Milton, Massachusetts, and heads for the sun-dappled Vineyard, revelling in fantasies about the marvellous ...”

“... a bang, but the rest knew nothing until, about twenty minutes later, Mr Kebede appeared in the hall in his stockinged feet, saying there was a fire in his flat. He thought it had started at the back of his fridge. He called the police before going to the door of his next-door neighbour, Maryam Adam, who was three months pregnant. ‘It was exactly 12.50 ...”

“... his Lionel Bart tendency. The production numbers that animate his pitch, so that he can be a music hall turn as well as a scholarship boy. A fabulous exuberance and a chameleon respect, that has him becoming, or seeming to become, the thing he witnesses. ‘The eye altering alters all.’ He offers a sympathetic reading to Blake’s ‘babooneries’, the ...”

“... you say about him, you say about yourself. ‘The whole corpus of Robespierre studies is a hall of mirrors,’ Mark Cumming says in his piece in this volume. Intending only to look at Robespierre, we see ourselves with our own startled eyes, starved or gross, inflated or diminished. Carlyle’s ‘thin lean Puritan and Precision’ scuttles forever ...”

“... the time she returned home her ‘path was set’, and she arranged to graduate early from Erasmus Hall High School (where her classmates included Neil Diamond and the chess champion Bobby Fischer, who dressed ‘like some sort of deranged pilot’). She worked backstage at a theatre in Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began ...”

“... Polmont on Sunday, 3 June, she was distraught. She told them there had been a big fight in the hall and she had been threatened. Linda alerted one of the prison officers. Someone spoke to Katie, but she wasn’t thought to be at risk of harming herself. At some point during the night, she hanged herself from a doorstop on her cell wall. A postmortem ...”

“... and even less well resourced: in 2020, before the Troubles Legacy Act was passed, Chief Constable Simon Byrne claimed it would take twenty years to get through its outstanding caseload. Legacy inquests have dragged on for years, too, in part because government departments have been slow to disclose information requested by the courts.In 2015, with the help of ...”

“... some broken chunks of polystyrene. A second soldier comes into view, too busy firing down the hall to help his comrade.Another video selfie shows a man with a dirt-splattered face lying in a crater in a snow-covered field. He wears a Russian tankman’s headgear, with its distinctive padded strips. ‘Hi everybody,’ he says to the camera. ‘I’m in a ...”

“... 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 the play of a great free-wheeling exercised intelligence (‘I will walke heere in the Hall ... ’tis the breathing time of day with me’) makes the work what it is, the world’s most sheerly entertaining tragedy, the cleverest, perhaps even the funniest. Dr Johnson meant this when he gave it ‘the praise of variety’, adding: ‘The pretended ...”

“... called The Old Mill or The Old Forge or The Old Rectory. All of them, I imagine, with prams in the hall. Cyril Connolly’s strictures on this point may have been one of the reasons Larkin claimed The Condemned Playground as his sacred book and which led him, meeting Connolly, uncharacteristically to blurt out: ‘You formed me.’ But if his definition of ...”

“... magnificent teeth’, who was then working in Washington alongside the distinguished astronomer Simon Newcombe. Her parents had reservations when the couple got engaged in 1878: he had no notable ancestors, save Jonathan Edwards (who was only a distant relation); his means were modest and there was a family history of mental illness. Mabel, however, found ...”