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“... Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.Under cover of night, my brothers and I crept around town perpetrating ...”

“... what under-writes, and justifies, the colourful behaviour of the ghastly characters trapped within Martin Amis’s London Fields. Weather as prediction. Weather as a liquid mirror in which that sick man, the writer, reads our future. The skies run like a river of poisons, warning of crimes committed in remote countries. We are ...”

“... and the NBC show forms the backbone of Alan Bleasdale’s play. ‘Older Presley’ – played by Martin Shaw in purple pyjamas – clutches an attaché case of medications to his side, ceasing abruptly from soliloquy and self-pity to gaze spellbound at his lithesome former self. At one point, Presley, who is attended around the clock by minions, halts the ...”

“... are holding me hostage … I cannot tolerate any more.’The recipient of his disgruntlement was Martin Zapater, who would provide a vital sounding board for his friend’s frustrations and fantasies. Zapater had experienced a difficult start in Zaragoza himself, but went on to make his fortune through the buying, leasing and selling of land, becoming so ...”

“... Jean Calvin asked, lambasting the pair for filling the Gospel with ‘wicked additions’. Martin Luther thought that the papists hoped to conceal knowledge about Muhammad because they knew how similar his Alcoran was to their own adulterated brand of Christianity. He pushed for a printed edition of the Quran in Latin, and wrote the preface when it ...”

“... Should we read the darkest of his plays – including Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, King Lear and Macbeth – as artefacts of these plague-ridden times? Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists delved into almost every dark corner of their audiences’ imaginations: murder, witchcraft, incest, civil war, apostasy. Playgoers saw rape victims stagger ...”

“... of Wales asked his father, George V, if he could have the use of Fort Belvedere at Windsor the king was surprised: ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for? Those damn week-ends I suppose.’ He caved in and perhaps regretted it, for the weekends with their associated guests and amusements made possible the affair with Wallis Simpson and so ...”

“... that during the school holidays his father would drop him off in the morning at a snooker club in King’s Cross before heading into Soho for work. The club was his crèche, he recalled fondly, though he admits it wasn’t ideal for a child to spend so much time around adults and cigarette smoke. He made his first century break – scoring more than a ...”

“... thousand missing originated in East Germany itself, and it corresponds pretty well with Martin Middlebrook’s cautious estimate, in The Bomber Command War Diaries, that deaths ‘may have exceeded 50,000’. Any visitor to the present-day DDR can see that the still-occupying Soviets continue to impress upon its citizens that Germany suffered just ...”

“... was apparently not a matter of high spiritual drama: his instructor, the celebrity Jesuit Martin D’Arcy, was struck by how very ‘matter of fact’ Waugh’s approach was. For someone who missed ‘the restraint of a traditional culture’, the unmitigated authority of the universal Church naturally had a salutary appeal. Part of Waugh’s religion ...”

“... and log every instance, all the way from D.H. Lawrence and Anna Wickham through John Betjeman to Martin Amis, of one single placename’s use to connote a vast tundra of anodyne, apathetic anonymity. Here, though, Croydon is exactly where you’d expect Lodge to make his couple come from: a prompt for often disappointingly chummy humour at the expense of ...”

“... from within, from a recognition and rejection of human alikeness between watcher and villain. Martin Scorsese’s brutal, dazzling film about everyday life in the lower ranks of the Mafia, GoodFellas, plays with this gothic scheme of the watcher drawn into the criminal underworld, but with an irony that partly accounts for the work’s shocking impact. We ...”

“... the city. Thousands died. But there was no surrender, and the city was finally relieved by the new king, William of Orange. Every year, the Orange Order, the Apprentice Boys and others celebrate the victory by burning an effigy of Lundy to shouts of ‘no surrender!’ Pinned to its chest is a sign that says: ‘Lundy the Traitor’. When Foster realised she ...”

“... the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’, and Rebecca, ‘Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’ – are in iambic octosyllabic couplets and can run to fifty lines or so. How did Clara Butt contrive to sing ...”

“... the tidiness and neatness of argument that we normally admire in a work of scholarship. Like Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust, it takes the form of a list: there is one set of names and places after another, with no subordination to a grand theme or decisive conclusion. We don’t even know for sure the number of those who left Germany after 1933, let ...”