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“... their presence in an enclosed space, as he put it, the ‘equivalent of being inside a music-hall horse-skin’. He took the process one stage further and had them sharing a bed (if it was good enough for Laurel and Hardy, he told them, it was good enough for Morecambe and Wise). Enforced domestic proximity gave them a Pinteresque appreciation of the ...”

“... They were reckless and factional men in a reckless and factional age: E.S. Turner has something of James Boswell’s felicity when it comes to conveying the whiff and fever of the period in question. He shows us the men whom Cowper deplores in ‘The Task’: The pastor, either vain By nature, or by flatt’ry made so, taught To gaze at his own splendour, and ...”

“... is as richly stuffed with outrageous performances as a Goon Show script or a night at the music hall. Amos Barking, alias Henry Swansea (the name under which he enlisted in the Civil Service), is a professional liar who in some hard-to-pin-down sense is searching for the truth about himself: in other words, he is our old friend the unreliable narrator. His ...”

“... woman, was no doormat, but there are times when it’s hard not to see her as a bit of a hall carpet, muting the sound while enduring the impact of her husband’s many comings and goings. A test case for where you stand on the question of Wells and women is provided by the book published in 1984 under the title H.G. Wells in Love, edited by his ...”

“... of Webb’s houses – he was largely a domestic architect – were built for men like Morris and James Beale, the owner of Standen, who got their money from industry, business and the professions and had no roots in the land, however vocal their attachment to it. At the start of Webb’s career there was still hope for a revival of farming and country ...”

“... art: ‘plastic art’, ‘plastic merit’ and ‘plastic beauty’ were high compliments. Henry James, describing an aesthete, notes that ‘his appreciation ... was based partly on his fine sense of the plastic.’ Yet a hundred years after Baudelaire the figurative meaning of ‘plastic’ had fallen; it was now nearly synonymous with words like ...”

“... and law in the Jamaica controversy. He is troubled by the verdict of historians such as Catherine Hall and Stefan Collini that the organised attempts to bring Eyre and others to justice had, in Hall’s words, absolutely no effect. I doubt whether this is the real issue. Practically everything that happens has some ...”

“... and plenty to try tempers much more pliant than Macready’s. The diary of Drury Lane’s manager, James Winston, has frequent entries such as, ‘During the rehearsal Elliston got Margerum, Elison, Edwards, Tokely and Philips [actresses] into his room and attempted to be too familiar with them but was interrupted’ (1 April 1822), or: ‘The play waited a ...”

“... bin Laden’s hideout under torture. ‘A racist society can’t but fight a racist war,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1967, ‘the assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.’ During the war on terror the traffic between the US and various shithole countries wasn’t only in assumptions: there was also a wholesale exporting of ...”

“... of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July ...”

“... Christian alleyways. When the UN helicopter, white as a clay pipe, clatters low over the town hall, no one looks up. When the sun sinks into the Mediterranean and dusk falls, drivers rushing north on the Larnaca-Nicosia motorway can’t fail to see the gigantic, taunting Turkish flag picked out in flashing lights on the slopes of the Kyrenia Mountains in ...”

“... of the Edwardian ‘knut’ (a more philistine version of the dandy and a stock figure of music-hall fun), he explains the two forces behind the knut’s demise: younger sons of the aristocracy being forced to work and the passing of the spat. The First World War would be a better answer but it’s exactly the sort of explanation that’s out of place in ...”

“... copies of the New Statesman and a collective season ticket to the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall. They read Proust and Spengler, Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway ...”

“... Arnold, who offloaded her onto Axel when he got married. The old grandfather clock in the hall struck half-past seven as I entered avenue de Villiers silently as a ghost. It was the hour when punctually to the minute Mamsell Agata started to rub the patina off my old refectory table in the dining-room, there was a fair chance to reach in safety my ...”

“... case would never have had the nerve to speak to him. I’d first heard his voice in Exeter College hall some time in 1955. The lower end of the scholars’ table where I was sitting was only a yard or two from high table where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like ...”