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“... The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the east coast.) ‘I see by a handbill in the grocer’s shop that a man is going to lecture on the Gorilla in a few weeks,’ said Edward FitzGerald, who lived near Woodbridge. ‘So there is something to look forward ...”

“... friar), best-known for his image of the recapture of Bahia from the Dutch, painted for the Hall of Realms in the Buen Retiro palace, but shown here to have been a gifted painter of sacred scenes as well. Another relatively neglected artist whose importance is stressed here is Juan Sanchez Cotan, whose Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber ...”

“... with edges where tone meets tone. In their detailed account of the ceiling of the staircase hall at Würzburg, Alpers and Baxandall analyse the most commanding example of this talent for the elliptical and the unresolved. The light changes from hour to hour and season to season; the view of the painting changes as the viewer mounts the staircase. They ...”

“... time at the Trafalgar Studios. I saw the first production at Wyndham’s in 1964 with Madge Ryan, Peter Vaughan and Dudley Sutton. Good in the part Sutton was already too old, as have been most of the actors who’ve played in it since. It’s a play I would dearly like to have written, though these days for it to retain its shock value the young man should ...”

“... is that I didn’t actually see it except on YouTube, because Labour wouldn’t let me into the hall to watch the speeches (the party didn’t seem to think the LRB was a ‘relevant media outlet’), and I couldn’t get near any of the relays, and the internet was hopeless, which is the reason, I guess, all the bigger news teams brought their own. Even ...”

“... an immediate countervailing effect in a cynical repudiation of John Bright; but in Birmingham Town Hall on 12 May 1958, exactly one hundred years after Bright had spoken there, Taylor concluded his own speech to a CND meeting by echoing Bright’s words (and shed his own tears with his old history master afterwards). What was Taylor’s youthful fling with ...”

“... volume there is a poem called ‘It’s hard to dislike Ewart’. Too true, as Clive James or Peter Porter might say, possibly with a certain wry exasperation. Generally speaking, our fondness and admiration for poets does go with a potential of patronage or dislike, a pleasure in our sense of the absurdities and vulnerabilities of their worlds – Keats ...”

“... Cabinet? Sometime in the spring of 1967, I trudged along to a protest meeting at Oxford Town Hall. The line-up was of the sort summarised by the phrase ‘stage army of the good’. A moon-faced vicar or two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on ...”

“... It entitled me to the secret hoard of bananas that were kept in the cool and musty larder off the hall, whose darkness and echoey flagstone floor, a few steps down from ground level, spooked me sufficiently that I never dared to go there alone. The mice, who scurried over the draining boards in the kitchen, made their headquarters in the larder. In wartime ...”

“... until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. A collection of fugitive pieces, Carnival, Hysteria and Writing, will be published by Oxford next year with an introduction by Stuart Hall, with whom Allon studied ...”

“... Once there was a town hall official in Cumberland who was so enthralled by the mountains that he walked and walked them, penetrating every byway, surveying every vista. To amuse himself he drew them and wrote about them, year after year. And the more his marriage languished, the more he walked, and drew, and wrote, until the seven volumes of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells were complete ...”

“... going to happen at all, it was most likely during the futurist frenzy of the early 20th century. Peter Vergo, in The Music of Painting, examines a neglected aspect of the modernist era, when a variety of painters, poets, composers and inventors became preoccupied with the convergence of visual and aural stimuli – a utopian race towards a future of total ...”

“... became a schoolmaster in Kent, and his son became a headmaster in Essex, and his son, my father, Peter Bunting, fought with distinction, while only a very young man, in the Second World War, and after it was over went up to Brasenose College, Oxford – the first time a Bunting had been so elevated, and unfortunately the last, since I was a student only at ...”

“... referred to in the text as ‘Josef K’ lest we miss the allusion) is a former Music Hall performer, a mind-reader whose powers fade out at London’s perimeter. He lives in four different lodgings at the four corners of the city and dulls his clairvoyance with copious beer and talk. But the roar on the other side of the city’s silence is ...”

“... make women free. Not all women, of course – someone would have to staff the communal eating-hall, a matter which did not worry Gilman, whose élitism, racism and commitment to eugenics give Allen pause. Gilman wanted a world which would be right for people like herself. Allen’s book shows she had reason to believe the one she had been born into did ...”