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“... with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet. Earlier that year Ashbery had been turned down by the Fulbright committee for ...”

“... Oliver Craske​ begins his biography of Ravi Shankar by telling an Indian parable. A blind man, stroking an elephant’s trunk, thinks he is holding a snake. Another blind man, running his hands along the animal’s leg, assumes he is touching a tree trunk; a third mistakes its tail for a rope ...”

“... about two sisters, as different as any two humans could possibly be, who fall into the orbit of a man whose sexual power may be likened to gravity. Williams wanted a great director for his play but weeks passed with no word from Kazan, who was called Gadget or Gadge by everybody in the theatre world. When Williams called Kazan at home, Molly, Kazan’s ...”

“... no other pedestrians to be seen and no cars on the roadway. Jacobson bid farewell to this Nick Ray set in the mid-Fifties. Unlike so many of the tens of thousands of South Africans who would soon be exiled, and whose lives abroad would always seem to them provisional, he was able to settle pretty thoroughly in London. From here, in due course, he could ...”

“... no percentage in Bill’s advisers bullet-pointing paperbacks composed by a peripatetic, a white man who wrote in black-face. Griffin does not aspire to Easy’s confidential charm, his bright-eyed savvy, his innocence. He’s a white man’s black, darker in spirit, thwarted and confused. And New Orleans, the setting for ...”

“... inescapably on the importance of the digital sampler, invented early in the decade. Beadle is a man with strong opinions. At one point he describes Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as ‘possibly the most over-rated album of all time’. His attitude to changes brought about by new music technology is generally positive. Samplers are the most ...”

“... possible basis of regress instead of progress in evolution. Thus when Darwin wrote The Descent of Man in 1871, he now cautioned his readers that ‘progress is no invariable rule’. Edwin Ray Lankester, one of Darwin’s younger followers, soon called attention to the existence of parasites as apparent examples of ...”

“... ugly comedy out of the dead animals about which Chardin is elegiac (although the grinning ray and snarling cat of his first Salon piece suggest he could have come close to matching the brutal truthfulness about dead meat you get in Goya’s picture of a calf’s head). Morandi simplified and coarsened the surface of pictures so that the story the ...”

“... first time. Five years later, at the age of 28, after working as a reporter in Chicago and a PR man in Schenectady, New York, he published his first short story. He then abandoned PR to write fiction on a freelance basis – those were the happy days before television, he reminds us, when a writer could support himself and his family just by writing short ...”

“... working life in a relatively open-minded Egypt. Alhazen was a proto-Popperian. ‘The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists,’ he wrote, ‘if learning the truth be his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side.’ Suspect your faith ...”

“... to become a kind of force field, drawing outsiders into their own peculiar ‘atmosphere’. Ray Costelloe was one such. She had been at Newnham with Elinor Strachey’s daughter and was apparently in love with the family in general and with Pippa in particular. That she married Oliver rather than any of the others was more the result of his ...”

“... urge and reposition the four types of stone that compose the spit. Now it resembles the tail of a ray or skate, now it’s a sea-tangle head, now it’s a hand whose forefinger points westward. Sometimes it settles down as the head of a bear with an eye and snout that look east in July, west in the second August. If the images were printed on successive pages ...”

“... escapist crap for the well-heeled middle-class market’. A conventional put-down by a man distancing himself, quite reasonably, from his disadvantaged background as an old Etonian with a family pile in darkest Kent. The real Ackroyd, Peter, it is felt, has also peaked at the right time, in cabbing alongside James into riparian London for this ...”

“... time he was wearing a red hat, the very one referred to in the title of a subsequent work, The Man in the Red Hat. During his final year of life he also made a home video, La Pudeur et l’impudeur, which was screened on television a month after his death. Yet another Aids book, Cytomégalovirus, was published at this time and a posthumous novel, Le ...”

“... Macfarlane Burnet and Frank Fenner. Macfarland Burnet and Fenner described some remarkable work by Ray Owen, an agricultural geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, who had found that all cattle twins, whether fraternal or identical, had the same blood group. This, Owen suggested, was due to a fact known for years: that cattle twins often shared one ...”