“... and wrap gleaming like gold armour. Her nails were nicely manicured and painted a sort of pearl grey. She seemed scared in general and nervous in particular, but I think I understood it was probably just her thing, this immense sense of smallness, the distance and resignation in her eyes that flew away as soon as she smiled. When Didion laughs she laughs ...”

“... reflection, that maybe it can’t. Hence the current perplexity. History might reasonably credit Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin as the first to notice that something may be seriously wrong in this part of the wood. Their 1979 paper, ‘The Spandrels of S. Marco and The Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, ignited an ...”

“... consumption and fossil-fuel burning in the world’s richest countries.The environmental historian Stephen Pyne calls our era the ‘pyrocene’, a global regime of burning: coal and oil, agricultural land and forest, bush and wetland, most of it planned. The Anthropocene, Pyne says, implies dominion over nature. He prefers to emphasise the fact that, wherever ...”

“... humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen Spender as ‘a literary mover and shaker, knighted in 1983. His wealthy, artistic parents sent him to various private schools and Oxford, but he left without taking a degree.’ Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his ...”

“... in the stage play in the 1920s; Michelle Pfeiffer, also fifty, was, as ever, Michelle Pfeiffer in Stephen Frears’s film version of 2009). The curtains are pink, as are the paper shades on the electric sconces and the ‘ravishing’ flesh of the nymphet in the painting on the wall. And Léa’s dressing-gown, and her underwear, and the strawberries she eats ...”

“... a conference on the literature of the Second World War. Asked for suitable names, I recommend Stephen Spender (because of his experience de-Nazifying German libraries after the war) and Alan Ross. When I mention that Ross served in the Navy and, in poems like ‘Murmansk’, recalls the war in the Baltic, Stabnikov seems satisfied. We pass the now famous ...”

“... domain of the writer, the domain of ‘unconscious reality’ as she put it in a letter to Stephen Clingman, to which the writer, unlike the intellectual, has unique, almost mystical access. ‘Even if he writes about a great public event, or war or revolution,’ she said in her acceptance speech for the 1961 W.H. Smith Prize for Friday’s ...”

“... a wholesome symptom of disdain.Yet now and then, there are thumps and crashes behind this great, grey safety-curtain, and unsightly bulges appear in it, and sometimes great rips and tears. Politics here a bit trite, you say? Perhaps. But the following things really happened. President Kennedy was shot down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered ...”

“... legal consequence. The IPC drew on the ‘famine scales’ drawn up by the scholars Paul Howe and Stephen Devereux. Their prototype had two dimensions. ‘Magnitude’ was measured by the number who had perished from starvation and related causes, and by extension, the total affected population. ‘Severity’ measured the intensity of starvation in a ...”

“... of the USA, credit-rich geeks, surfers with trembling fingers. The ones who are currently sampling Stephen King. When the investment pays off, the nouveau plutocrats buy into old-fashioned bricks and mortar. Property prices soar. Clerkenwell booms from the Euro-rinsed Smithfield meat market, through Cloth Fair, back to Hoxton and Shoreditch. The psychic ...”

“... was shown on TV. The film, written by the Anglo-Pakistani Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, told the story of Anglo-Pakistani Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) who, tired of being patronised and bullied by his family, decides to get ahead by opening a gleaming new laundrette in South London. Having acquired the necessary start-up cash by ...”

“... killing, starvation and humiliation, the promotion of criminality – of a lawless ‘grey zone’ of the kind evoked by Primo Levi, in which members of a persecuted group are enlisted to police, brutalise and, at times, kill their own – has become a defining feature of Israel’s rule inside Gaza.In The Arabs and the Holocaust, published in ...”

“... has all the flatness of depression. She kept the shooting to overcast days to create a ‘blue, grey, mauve’ light. Documenteur was to be the ‘shadow’ of Mur Murs (1981), a bright and sparky documentary about the murals of LA that was made at the same time. It opens with a five-minute incantation in which Varda free-associates on the ineffability ...”

“... both a discussion of old age in Plato’s Republic and an anecdote from Aelian about the dyeing of grey hair. The awareness of mortality even in the midst of jollity is illustrated by passages from the great tragedians and a later epigram: ‘Give me the sweet goblet, made from earth, as I am; that earth in which I shall lie again when I am dead.’ These ...”