“... blue sky dazzling in its radiance, and the horizon a glorious mixture of yellow, red and gold’. Mortal danger caused a rush of intense feeling, the ‘lonely impulse of delight’ experienced by Yeats’s Irish airman. Van Dyke Fernald​ is almost a cliché: public school and Oxbridge-educated, rushing to his death with a head full of Horace and ...”

“... answer, he proceeded to pour the wine over the back of my hand. Just a few years earlier, in 1969, Arthur Corbett, first husband of the famous male-to-female transsexual April Ashley, sought an annulment of their marriage on the grounds that at the time of the ceremony, Ashley was ‘a person of the male sex’. In the course of the proceedings, Corbett ...”

“... purposeful ones. What to us are featureless alcoves of scrofulous masonry (and with no evidence of gold) presumably echoed to the orgies and barbarities which are even now being detailed on the cassettes to which everyone else is listening intently. 4 February. Condoleezza Rice announces that the US has no plans to attack Iran at the present moment, the ...”

“... after Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, and just eight years after he revealed the gold funerary mask. These were global events. Audiences in both Cairo and London were enthralled by the excavation. The Times managed to secure an exclusive deal for press access. Carter’s imperious handling of the tomb, his preferment of a British newspaper ...”

“... calls himself ‘a grumpy old Marxist’, in a Paul Mertonish, estuarine boot-boy-wiv-a-heart-of-gold way. What was stylish and dynamic about LM must have been largely his work – I can’t imagine it being Furedi’s. Which means that the magazine’s downfall was largely Hume’s responsibility as well. Glancing over Hume’s ‘journalism of ...”

“... Romantic lyric. In Winterreise, the relative mediocrity of the poems only emphasises the musical gold into which Schubert spun them, as though the monochrome light of the poetry has passed through the prism of Schubert’s imagination and been scattered into an array of 24 separate colours. But too often in performance, the singer allows the persona of the ...”

“... Groucho was an affectionate and dutiful father to both of his children by this marriage: Arthur, whose memoir of Groucho is perceptive and has some human depth, and Miriam, known in Hollywood as a girl of charm and intelligence whom her father doted on past anyone’s good. In the divorce settlement, he would give Ruth half of everything. Miserly in ...”

“... and one of the last, occurred at Salem in Massachusetts Bay Colony – it was the subject of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. It began when the minister’s nine-year-old daughter, Betty Parris, and her cousin, Abigail Williams, complained that they were being tormented by invisible beings. Three local women, convicted of bewitching them, named other ...”

“... has insisted on stopping here for sandwiches. He is quite like a narcissus – so white and gold. I will come either Wednesday or Thursday night to your rooms. Send me a line. Bosie is so tired: he lies like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him.’ The following January, he was writing to Douglas: ‘My Own Boy, Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it ...”