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“... he’s gone and joined this weird sect. He sits in a cave with his guru, a batty old bugger called John and scribbles on scrolls stuff to scare you while the rabbi goes rabbiting on. He seems dead to us does my brother. He’s been so thoroughly brainwashed by John ‘I look in your eyes,’ said our mother ‘But the bright ...”

“... that British new music – equally suspicious of European modernism and anything American, whether John Cage or Janis Joplin – wasn’t a club worth joining. Although he had no desire to take up 12-tone composition techniques, Arnold Schoenberg’s music appealed to him intellectually and he engaged with it seriously – in noticeable contrast to Vaughan ...”

“... Up the lane, at the lodge of an army camp, a ‘Yorkshire terrier’ ran about. The young poet took ‘the Carlisle train’ to school ‘in Dorset’, people had maps of Flanders above the fireplace to follow the progress of the First World War, and German prisoners were held on a ship on Belfast Lough. Ulster was a microcosm of the British-Irish ...”

“... Octagon Theatre. One chain of events focuses on the Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, Mr John Stalker, who was recently suspended for three months during an internal disciplinary investigation and subsequently reinstated by the lay Police Authority, despite the evident willingness of his senior colleagues to have him face a tribunal. The other ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... In February, two elderly men met in a Middle Eastern suburb and took afternoon tea. As old men do, they reminisced, chatted about their grandchildren and speculated on the perilous state of the world. The younger of the two had a problem: he had a reputation for being an aggressor and none of his neighbours, or his neighbours’ powerful friends, believed him when he said he had put away his weapons for good ...”

“... McFarlane to contribute to his biographical series ‘Teach Yourself History’ a short book on John Wyclif, an Oxford intellectual dead for six hundred years and the only arch-heretic bred in Catholic England before the Tudors and the Reformation. In one way this wasn’t surprising, since Rowse and McFarlane were friends. But in another way it was, since ...”

“... may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants. Here was the promise of a main event in the comet’s six-year visit to the Anglo-Scottish cultural ...”

“... Rudolf Schlichter. Works by Georg Grosz hung on the wall; Kurt Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin and John Heartfield were regulars. Brecht and his crowd were fascinated by America, by its new, brutal version of capitalism which was remaking the world, by its technology and its popular culture. The fascination found its way into his verse and his plays. He went ...”

“... The state allocated these in too small quantities or not at all. There were bound to be those who took the (diminishing) risk of supplying them for a premium. In other countries, there are merchants: in the Soviet Union, there were only criminals; and since they needed protection, the criminals criminalised large sections of the Party and the state, creating ...”

“... it handed the control of inflation over to the bank in 1997: the single most important decision it took about the economy, and one not mentioned or hinted at in either its manifesto or the general election campaign. At the same time, Labour took away the regulatory role of the bank and gave it to a new agency, the Financial ...”

“... Pilkington had been a pet of Swift’s and had received from him harsh treatment that she took for affection: sardonic put-downs, peremptory instructions and plenty of pinching. ‘The Dean’, as she always calls him, showed her his poems and letters and instructed her in literature, though he was ‘a very rough sort of a Tutor’. In the early ...”

“... except how to please him ... I always loved the sort of people who were cool towards me, and only took me for what I was worth ... There is the case of Dyakov ... I shall never forget the night when we were travelling from Pirogovo, and, wrapped up under a travelling rug, I wanted to kiss him and cry. There was sensuality in that feeling, but why it ...”

“... perhaps better known, thanks to the immense success of the HBO series, as Game of Thrones, which took its title from the first novel in the series.† Game of Thrones was first described to me, by someone familiar with the project from before its initial broadcast, as ‘The Sopranos meets Lord of the Rings.’ At that point, I knew I was going to like ...”

“... stage, he said, ‘was where I master time’. Springsteen bet his life on music. ‘Whatever it took, I was in,’ he said. He and his various early bands sucked up the rejection of audiences, record producers, promoters. His credo, as one of his songs puts it, was ‘no retreat, no surrender’. ‘They didn’t understand they were dealing with men ...”