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“... robbery and rape of a woman of 88; gang warfare, vandalism, uriniferous subways, bent policemen. Roger Scruton devoted a Times column to a crude misreading of a poem by Reading about Lebanon, a controversy to which Ukulele Music alludes. Reading’s charlady supplies a suitable retort to Scruton – ‘When we want you to chirp up matey, we’ll rattle the ...”

“... adventure. He could have travelled in his youth had he been willing to put up with great hardship. Young Oliver Goldsmith hiked over the Continent, staying at various universities and earning his way by debating. This was not Johnson’s style: he could endure physical deprivation, certainly, but not the psychic deprivation of loneliness. His expansive ...”

“... him through France, en route to yellow jersey and victor’s laurels: the vehicle carrying young James Murdoch, his Team Sky paymaster. The other stroke of luck with the gold medal was that David Cameron, with his reverse Midas touch, chose not to make the time-trial finish at Hampton Court one of his photo opportunities. While Cameron, with his ...”

“... a close-up study of applied science. The lab in question was at the Salk Institute, where Roger Guillemin, an endocrinologist, had been at work on a project that later earned him a Nobel with his rival Andrew Schally for ‘discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain’. Latour embedded himself in Guillemin’s lab, describing ...”

“... saloon of state’.The light, space and clarity of Kettle’s Yard was part of the reaction to Roger Fry’s ‘age of the ottoman and the whatnot’, and Ede was in revolt from childhood. At twelve he had saved £8 from his pocket money and, instead of the expected bicycle, used it to buy a Queen Anne desk, which he kept all his life. He didn’t enjoy ...”

“... a six-note glockenspiel in its rump including miniature bells and hammers. The rest are secular: young women holding lutes, citterns and mandolins. An account of one of these players by the art historian Fritz Saxl from 1936 describes the way it moves with ‘a combination of stateliness and grace … The feet move slowly, the figure seems to float. The ...”

“... you go back to the hotel?’); sexual longing, confusion and mad passions; teenage marriage, young motherhood, and a Doll’s House bolt; soaring ambition accompanied by wracking self-doubt; an arduous climb to the top that left her competitors littered on the slopes; mortal illness, and near miraculous recovery; heroism, heartache, more heroism and more ...”

“... of Apple Computers, Stuart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Record-breaking athletes like Roger Bannister find their way onto the roll of honour, as does the Salieri of Amadeus: a peak performer deflected from his mission by hopeless envy of Mozart’s inimitable achievement (there are heights, as Garfield admits, which really can’t be scaled by ...”

“... was a crowd round the iron stove at the end of the corridor. A dozen passengers pressed about the young uniformed conductress who normally gave out glasses of tea. But they were not there for the stove or the tea. Her radio was on, full blast, and they were listening to a voice. It was saying, loudly and confidently: ‘Kto za?’ (Who’s in favour?) Then it ...”

“... last someone has dared to speak out …’ Some of Powell’s lifelong opponents, including the young Devon MP Michael Heseltine, conceded that their constituents, even in rural areas which had scarcely seen a black face, were right behind Enoch. If the present system of election to the Tory leadership had been in operation, he would have swept home in any ...”

“... Theoria, his 15th book, and was critic for the Sunday Telegraph. For the death of a relatively young art critic there was a surprising amount of obituary and tribute: ‘surprising’ because the British press has little interest in art and art criticism – coverage offered in the mainstream press is usually in the hands of one of the arts editor’s ...”

“... always their most enthusiastic proponent). The indictment was drawn up most plangently by the late Roger Scruton and most pugnaciously by David Starkey. It accuses ‘the liberal elite’ of foisting five abominations on the long-suffering British people who asked for none of them and find them all alien intrusions: membership of the EU, mass ...”

“... a good job of describing how this state of affairs came about. The story begins with an apolitical young woman whose anti-Communist convictions were so conventional that in 1959 she accepted the ceremonial title of ‘Miss Army Recruiter’. A budding Method-trained actress, the daughter of an American icon, she fell in love with ...”

“... Maeve Brennan​ could stop traffic. According to her colleague Roger Angell, she laid waste to a ‘dozen-odd’ writers and artists after the New Yorker hired her as a staff writer in 1949. She makes a cameo as the magazine’s ‘resident Circe’ in a biography of the cartoonist Charles Addams; legend tells that she was Truman Capote’s inspiration for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s ...”

“... subdivided by multiple gold lines, representing the embellished walls that enclose four goggling young men in hats. They form a dark pyramid that peaks in a lad whose hat brim is perfectly enclosed between two more vertical gold lines, to the left of which are two descending diagonals, representing part of a staircase. This infatuation with line is ...”