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“... David Benedictus is the Editor of Readings for BBC Radio’s Book at Bedtime. His Sunny Intervals and Showers is ill-suited for late-night reading, since it is not good to have the mind quickened from torpor by such speculations as ‘What happened to all the water in Noah’s Flood?’ or ‘Can the beatings of a butterfly’s wings start a typhoon?’ or, on a more practical level, ‘Could I have dealt with a mischievous fireball in the kitchen as summarily as that (unnamed) Smethwick housewife who “courageously sent it packing, and suffered nothing more serious than a burnt frock”?’ Still less does it assist slumber to reflect on the implications of that 1990 Sun headline (surely the longest Sun headline ever written) which said: ‘Britain has gone sex-crazy as red-hot lovers rush to do it in the great outdoors, say experts ...”

“... only the occasional phrase of what was being said on the summit, staring at the hillsides red and green with the dwarfish growth of Arctic summer. His All Holiness Bartholomew I, ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople and spiritual head of the Orthodox Churches of the world, had come to Greenland on his seventh Symposium voyage, repeating his call to humanity ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... to ‘Tenth-Year Elegy’ had just been published under the title ‘Someone Forgotten’ by one David Sumner in the very small magazine, Mankato Poetry Review (circulation approximately 200). As well as altering the title, Sumner had fiddled with line lengths, word order, and adjusted a few images, but the two poems were basically the same. Bowers’s ...”

“... who even managed his turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, on the night he green-lighted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. ‘Cool comedian and quiet commander,’ as Adam Gopnik described him then. The idea that his gifts could have taken him in many directions gives Obama a distinct sense of unease, the feeling that nothing is ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... pet name, if they have one: so you get two Berties (Edward VII and George VI), Georgie (George V), David (Edward VIII) and Lilibet. When it gets to the Windsors’ foreign cousins there are Willi, Nicky, Charlie (of Norway), Foxy (of Bulgaria), Missy and Mignon. The joke was exploited long ago in Cecil Beaton’s spoof My Royal Past, though Tomlinson’s ...”

“... lead in Darling, before Julie Christie came along. She danced on Ready Steady Go!, modelled for David Bailey, introduced Bob Dylan to London, broke Peter Blake’s heart, was part-owner of a frock shop in Carnaby Street, married and gave birth to a daughter all before dying in 1966 at the age of 28. Her story was remembered but her pictures weren’t: most ...”

“... the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s V-weapons knocked jagged holes in the soot-blackened brick of Bethnal Green, Stepney and Poplar, the three London boroughs that would eventually be merged to create Tower Hamlets, the muncipalities had begun knocking down old streets and moving their residents into newly built council houses, bigger and lighter than anything they ...”

“... last years of Mrs Thatcher’s reign it was Perec, not Sollers, who – with the publication of David Bellos’s translation of Life: A User’s Manual – found a keen British audience. There were logics in these things, as we shall see. Perec’s reputation might easily have crossed the Channel two decades earlier. His first novel, Les Choses, was ...”

“... differences were dictated by circumstance rather than by ideology. In any event, Cripps, the sea-green socialist incorruptible of the Thirties, turned out to be, if anything, slightly to the right of the pragmatic and gradualist Dalton. More important still, the same was true of the Party at large. The Left wanted to move faster than the Right, and was more ...”

“... intervention. ‘The miracle happened in that film emulsion. Who knows why?’ Writing in 1975, David Thomson compared Garbo to Christ – there were times in their lives when all they wanted was to be left alone – before concluding with a reiteration of the same ‘mysterious truth’: ‘She was photographed. She was all in the silver.’ Whether Garbo ...”

“... part of Molly’s memory of weekend mornings when all four of them – including her husband, David, who is absent through work for most of the novel – would lie together on the big bed: ‘Every single other thing – from the exhaustion of the week to evolution itself – is in the interest of this. This pure lack of desire. The need for absolutely ...”

“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”

“... in the 15 years she’s been writing novels. Her first, The Cast Iron Shore (1996), won the David Higham Prize for Fiction; her second, When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), won the Orange Prize over the shoo-in, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth; her third, Still Here (2002), was longlisted for the Booker Prize; her fourth, The Clothes on Their Backs ...”