“... How to identify which was which? The secrets that had to be kept close would then be what Gilbert Ryle – coincidentally, writing at exactly this time – called ‘knowing-that’: facts, theories, propositions, even tables, graphs, drawings. Or was the key element procedural or practical knowledge – in Ryle’s vocabulary, ‘knowing-how’: the ...”

“... sprawl scattered like so much confetti over the gnarly green terrain. In the distance, the tall white cluster of buildings that formed downtown Los Angeles poked through a corona of smog. Coming into view below was my destination: the 480-acre subdivision established in 1887 and named ‘Hollywood’ by a real estate speculator’s wife because, she ...”

“... Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, 27 years her senior, and destroyed his marriage to Susan Gilbert, Emily’s closest confidante. Like any good seductress, Todd was an opportunist. She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen ...”

“... I doubt if she’ll be pleased.Some of my liking, I confess, arises from sheer Southern California white trash fellow feeling. Pepper was born near Los Angeles and spent most of his rackety life (as I have) on the West Coast. His father was a shipyard worker and nasty alcoholic; his mother, a dim-witted teenage bride, didn’t want him and late in her ...”

“... writer, earlier than Thurber and much more distinguished. The Duke of Ferrara surely fathered Gilbert Osmond, Henry James’s lethal dilettante in The Portrait of a Lady: a man who at first represents ‘the artistic life’ to the naive heroine, but whose antiquarian talent proves in fact confined, in a penetrating image, to tracing the common coinage of ...”

“... the tiled halls, and now and again there was the silent apparition of a bald-headed man in a white towelling dressing-gown. I rented a cubicle, about which I remember only the enormous size of the key, and I lay down to sleep, but I couldn’t. I passed the night with a high fever, travelling through strange, lurid nightmares. In my lucid moments, I ...”

“... sculptors (also collected by Saatchi), on established Turner-winning Brits like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, on old bugbears like Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Shortly before Fuller’s death, he thought the tide was turning: Serota seemed to be coming into line, even Saatchi was investing in the School of London. Then it turned right back. In his ...”

“... slimness of his boyish figure, the slenderness of the bare legs that protruded from his billowing white shorts, one of the legs folding back and resting on the other knee.’ As they left the café, Wilde asked Gide if he wanted the boy. Gide nervously said that he did. Wilde, having made the arrangements, laughed uproariously as his suspicions about Gide’s ...”

“... and the American West Coast, Britain pushed the Versailles conference of 1919 to mandate the Gilbert and Caroline Islands, and the Marianas group, all formerly German, to Japan. Japan promptly, and illegally, fortified them. Japan’s supply lines to its new possessions crossed America’s communications with the Philippines, which also lay athwart ...”

“... officials from the British Consulate were waiting on the quay. The passengers (Helen, sheet-white) were bussed straight to the consulate, where they were offered sandwiches, tea, cigarettes and more forms to fill in. My uncle Peter thinks they were then put up for a couple of weeks in the Pera Palace Hotel, established in 1895 by the Wagons-Lits Company ...”