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“... J. P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George’s platform oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall. He could control an audience with the inspired timing of a stand-up comic. His one-liner about the House of Lords – ‘five hundred men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed’ – was fit to bring the house down. He was the politician as ...”

“... is angrier about his father’s remoteness. ‘With my parents, it wasn’t just the pram in the hall which was the enemy of promise. My parents didn’t want the pram anywhere in the house.’ Certainly, Thomas seems to have found fatherhood difficult: ‘How can no one be a father to someone?’ he had wondered in Neb, a sentence that might have been ...”

“... spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked ...”

“... at the gallery and the Victorian Society, dressed in forensic suits, taped off Walthamstow Town Hall and declared it a Heritage Crime Scene. As the dispute went on two things became clear: significant numbers of local people did not think that the best way to help one of London’s most deprived boroughs was to deprive it of its only world-class cultural ...”

“... which ‘conjures up the now familiar and haunting spectre of urban alienation’. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar is a ‘particularly depressing place to live in’, with an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’, mainly an ‘example of the late modernist avant-garde determination to realise a theoretical position at ...”

“... George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall where we were finally allowed a drink. The House of Lords is not, to be sure, the only British institution which reduces unsuspecting observers to a state of giggling incredulity. But for unblushing anachronism, it defeats even the Church of England, the ...”

“... Peter Redgrove had a secret. It was called ‘the Game’. Sexual in nature, this obsessive ritual ignited some of his most arresting poetry, and was vital to his personal mythology for sixty years. Known only to his lovers and a few in his inner circle, the Game has now been made public in Neil Roberts’s remarkable biography of the poet, published almost a decade after Redgrove’s death, along with a new Collected Poems ...”

“... the reality of a Slav majority in Austria. In the 1890s militant anti-semitism conquered the Town Hall of Vienna. Liberalism was increasingly, if never exclusively, a Jewish affair. Deserted by German-Austrians, Jews increasingly became dynastic patriots. Too late they discovered that in the competing arrogances of ethnic antagonism they had played a ...”

“... walls still look impressive, even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in the 14th century, he then built what was in effect a whole new Tudor palace within the medieval walls. This entire section of the castle, together with a state-of-the-art garden installed at a speed which would do ...”

“... with him. The story goes that Schoenberg dismissed him, telling him he lacked an ear for harmony. Peter Yates’s book Twentieth-Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound (1968), reported Schoenberg as saying that Cage was ‘not a composer – but an inventor of genius’, a back-handed compliment that stuck ...”

“... last Christmas season before the war he was given the part of Slightly, one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. Forty years later, Kenneth Tynan wrote of him that ‘in 1913 he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.’ It was not exactly ...”

“... of Canterbury gingerly touching the bone threaded through the nose of some Zulu warrior. Peter Hall’s Sanderson advert. The flat is airy and comfortable. A corridor lined with photographs, but not, as in my house, picked up at junk shops. His own school. His own life. Pre-war gym displays at Cheltenham College. Lindsay as a child in India ...”

“... an international best-seller. Not that constancy was a conspicuous feature of his career. Joseph Hall, ‘our English Seneca’, remarked that Lipsius was as constant as a chameleon. This mattered, for the true Stoic wishes to be judged by his life as much as by his writing. Stoic philosophy is a guide to conduct, and the philosopher, the man best-equipped ...”

“... proportionate and proving again that longueurs have less to do with length than with pace, which Peter Carey controls like a master, thwacking his prose along with all the exuberant free energy of a boy thwacking a hoop with a stick. To Herbert Badgery – funny man, raconteur and compère extraordinary of Illywhacker – the notion that a book might seem ...”

“... was conversion to Protestantism, a step taken by (among others) an uncle of William’s, Peter Warren. Warren would ultimately become admiral of the fleet and famous as a British naval hero; he would also serve as a model, and patron, for his nephew. By marrying into a leading family of Dutch New Yorkers, the Delanceys, Warren acquired a direct stake ...”