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“... rather than later?15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from their time together at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle and now himself Hon. Mr Justice Potts of the Queen’s Bench ...”

“... of virtuoso psychiatrist-bashing. (Both also provided the occasion for first-rate books: on Peter Sutcliffe, Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and Nicole Ward-Jouve’s The Street-Cleaner; on Dennis Nilsen, Brian Masters’s Killing for Company.) Before the 1981 trial of Peter Sutcliffe for the 13 ...”

“... Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his true worth has yet to be ...”

“... would have found the goings-on particularly funny, although he might well have found them stylish. Norman Hartnell designed some very pretty dresses for The Bedder’s Opera in 1922. There are illustrations to show what he looked like wearing them. He was particularly seductive in an off-the-shoulder number with roses appliquéd at the bustline and scattered ...”

“... it. The Modern American Novel is an ‘Opus Book’ (General Editors – Keith Thomas, Alan Ryan, Peter Medawar) intended for students. The Literature of the United States is a volume in the Macmillan History of Literature. But no Oxford undergraduate could get by with generalities like this aperçu of Professor Walker’s: ‘Jewish novels are ...”

“... from great movies: the likes of Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund, George Bailey, Travis Bickle and Norman Bates, who turn out, in the interstices of the entries, to have entangled lives and a dark plot all of their own. If only Howard Hawks wasn’t dead and had made a movie of Suspects we could all die happy and go to deconstruction heaven. Though the ...”

“... the urbane Old Etonian leader of the Liberal Party, had been accused of conspiring to murder Norman Scott, a former male model and Thorpe’s sometime lover, who had become a danger to his reputation and career. In the event the only victim was Scott’s great Dane, Rinka, shot dead on Exmoor by a hired hitman (a former airline pilot). At one point ...”

“... advised along those lines by his national defence procurement officer, an old friend called Peter Levene whom Heseltine had promoted to high office, in controversial circumstances, at a starting salary of £95,000 a year. Levene had been chairman of United Scientific Holdings, whose recent success had been based to a large degree on the cooperation of ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. Johnson was also concise: ‘personally, she is neither nice nor ...”

“... arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she ...”

“... The projectionist told me personally.’ Boys’ Town was a 1938 Hollywood movie, directed by Norman Taurog and admired for Spencer Tracy’s performance as a priest who rehabilitates juvenile delinquents in a kind of camp, through what we might call ‘tough love’, but not a film that would normally be considered a masterpiece. I imagine it must have ...”

“... a more powerful variant, methamphetamine, and trademarked it under the name Pervitin. As Norman Ohler relates in Blitzed, research into its military applications began almost immediately; it was used in combat for the first time in the early stages of the Second World War. Ohler’s hyperkinetic, immersive prose evokes its subjective effects on the ...”

“... a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists’: if Norman Mailer had been thinking aphoristically, he might have dropped the last four words and touched up the remainder. ‘Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has ...”

“... do if you’re a bachelor, or James Goldsmith, or a lesbian, or Welsh, or a good-looking nun, or Peter Parker, or a social worker, or a cat? You could always (well, not the cat) try taking Waugh to court. But who would want to stand up in the Old Bailey and declare himself not ‘the silliest man in England’? And who would wish to be measured and perhaps ...”

“... Sherman, who himself plays the dissipated drunkard Maximillian Cady. Cady and his successor, Norman Maine in A Star is Born, stand for many careers that foundered in drink and suicide. Today’s Hollywood producers and executives make more literal use of watering holes. Deals are christened with Perrier and story-pitching film-makers are met with clear ...”