“... table. She rushed over and did the Heimlich manoeuvre and saved his life. Next day the headline read: Barbra Streisand Takes the Food Right Out of a Person’s Mouth.’ Streisand repeats the joke in her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, to explain why she felt a ‘certain kinship’ with Bill Clinton during his presidency. ‘People can take an ounce of ...”

“... you’ve consented to it by dint of the numberless pages of small print you’ve neglected to read. Your identity is being trafficked and traded, with your permission, by interested parties about whom you know nothing. If any of your devices has geolocation technology, and you haven’t turned it off, you’re now transmitting your exact location to God ...”

“... is a sore head or a streaky patch on a window. Find the remedy, and it’s gone. Limbo dancing, Peter Hain’s sideburns, the Angry Brigade, King Crimson: these films are always so good on perky period souvenirs, so skilled at avoiding most emotions apart from the fake ones. Though actually, I wasn’t impressed by the period detail in Misbehaviour ...”

“... who travel much by bus in Holborn are likely to hear the conductors, not all of whom can have read the Dunciad, calling ‘Theobald’s Road’, ‘Tibbles Road’. Interestingly, the Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names supports both Pope and the bus conductors, pointing out that Teobaldus or Theobaldus is the Latin form of the name for which Tebald or ...”

“... chord – onto a dominant seventh, itself a discord crying out for resolution. But we can also read this reluctance to resolve as the musical equivalent of staying awake: a bid to suspend the passage of time, in which sleep gratefully acquiesces.I am interested in the way we take in Wagner’s music, or the way it takes us in. In tonal music a final ...”

“... to the co-op board on behalf of his agent, Andrew Wylie? Or that Roth’s friend Joel Conarroe read a goofy telegram at Roth’s sixtieth birthday bash purportedly from John Updike that began ‘Masel gov, you alte cocker’?), but it concretises the sense of comprehensiveness to an impressive, even irritating degree. Roth’s elysian childhood in ...”

“... recalling, is what John Le Carré called his fictional spy headquarters.And then​ there was Peter Sichel, a German Jew from a family who had lost their wine business to the Nazis. He had escaped to Bordeaux and, after France fell, to the US via Spain. Aged nineteen, he enlisted in the army the day after Pearl Harbor. Two years later, his fluency in ...”

“... a sentence or two and finds in them an exact account of a crime, a jewellery heist, he has just read about in the newspaper. He doesn’t know what this means, but thinks he should tell the police.He doesn’t make it to the police station, and the scene of his death is a much cited moment in film history; Lang himself copied it in his late work The ...”

“... Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the ...”

“... Last Tape; Beckett pointed out that the disposition of bodies in the punt was such that, to read the words as a request for sexual intercourse, the censor had to overlook the fact that Krapp’s penis would be at a 180 degree angle to the relevant object of desire. Knowlson narrates all this with gusto, and it is in the world of the theatre that he is ...”

“... Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service is conducted by Father Kit Cunningham who talks about Anna, saying how she had summoned him to the ...”

“... bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a one-act play ...”

“... the shame of the thing, was evident.’ Americans reacted politically to what they saw and read. Congress passed laws that utterly changed the South, so that blacks now vote freely and hold political office – and it is a region that looks to the future instead of the past. It was an astonishing social change, and it happened in part because the press ...”

“... need to do so, grew marketable apples, kept hens, geese and bees. For the house built for him by Peter Harland, he involved himself, following good arts and crafts tradition, in the choice of timbers, bricks and pavings, insisting on the inclusion of local flints. He was devoted to the Newbury Players, the strictly amateur orchestra he ...”

“... the book consists of letters: two to Sarah; several to ‘P – ’, who is Hazlitt’s confidant Peter George Patmore; and three to ‘J.S.K. – ’, or James Sheridan Knowles, recounting the final, farcical agonies of the affair. But the printed Liber Amoris is not the only source. There is a manuscript copy of Part One with additions and emendations in ...”