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“... chatted to the soon to be redundant staff. Others encouraged a yappy terrier to chase a tennis ball across the stretches of empty carpet where the display cases used to be. Most of us did as we had always done and leafed through books and put them down again: men who, perhaps like those in the fetish shop across the street, had deep and almost unreachable ...”

“... of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much ...”

“... The inquest on Charles Bravo in 1876 lasted a month and provided his parents’ solicitor, George Lewis, with the national celebrity which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the ...”

“... valuable and heartfelt than hearing the news or reading the paper, listening to Hank or Waylon or George and knowing that we are all part of the world’s heartbreak, its loss and disappointment mapped out in the songs of Hank and Waylon and George The effect of a refrain given by the indentation here perhaps ...”

“... for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside ...”

“... in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to know about Our Bridge. It’s a solid job; it almost bankrupted its British builders, Dorman ...”

“... see them dress up together, him in white tie and tails, for some evening event, often a charity ball, but I doubt whether they ever took the floor together; I imagine that she danced all night while he sat talking. There were some things they did together, including, she later told me, often making love (‘I can’t complain about him on those ...”

“... abandoning the chronological approach of his earlier volume for one that often keeps only one ball in the air at a time. Maybe that solution was hard to avoid, but it deprives his second volume of some of the grand narrative sweep of the first. It also bars the reader from a sense of the accumulation of difficulties felt by the Prime ...”

“... men and women my colleagues and I would train. We would win, without the sherry or the Trinity Ball or the Elizabethan Society. McDowell and Webb think well of Trinity, and why not? They are so closely identified with the College that to think well of it means to think well of themselves – a natural pleasure. From time to time they lament the fact that ...”

“... doors sometime back, the noticeboard was taken down. That noticeboard is behind a poem ‘Spot the ball’ which Frank Ormsby wrote in the Seventies: We persevere from habit. When we try These days our hope’s mechanical, we trust To accident. We are selective No longer, the full hundred crosses Filling the sky. It was Craig Raine who pointed out that this ...”

“... receive as much notoriety, but I would rather see my garbage gone than see some cat hit a ball 500 feet. And I would much rather not sing for a month than not go to the bathroom for a month.’I like to think Marx would have approved of this downhome explanation of the labour theory of value, and the last few weeks have provided an unusually cogent ...”

“... posed by Swift’s satire? Are the Houyhnhnms exemplary models of harmonious civility or – as George Orwell thought – robotic proto-fascists? Do the bestial Yahoos embody Swift’s ideas about human depravity, or does he also integrate, in what’s sometimes called the ‘soft’ reading of Gulliver’s Travels, the tools to allow us to escape the ...”

“... to trade with Russia came up against the Soviet determination to infiltrate their agents. Lloyd George behaved with admirable sangfroid – so it is no surprise that that archintriguer and hater of politicians, Henry Wilson, should enquire in his diary: ‘Is Lloyd George a traitor?’ In the end, Lloyd ...”

“... not even Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, Correggio’s Madonna of the Basket or Tintoretto’s St George and the Dragon, which were among the National Gallery’s most remarkable recent acquisitions. Dickens was certainly familiar with the paintings of Charles Eastlake, the keeper of the National Gallery between 1843 and 1847. Eastlake was the leading British ...”

“... on benches, men without colour sit apart from one another in silence. A girl bounces a fat ball on the cement over and over and over. The wind is freshening and the sloped light is turning gold. Birds speak with each other in the hushed leaves and in the wind there are the soft calls of children, but these noises are blown by the wind and are finally ...”