“... they made for Barbie some forty years ago. Similar revelations here would be illegal under Douglas Hurd’s new Secrets Bill. But then, of course, we are a decent nation; we don’t do things like that.16 April. The 98 Liverpool fans crushed to death at Sheffield bring back memories of a similar disaster at Bolton in 1946. We never took a Sunday paper ...”

“... journalism. They were sociable men, fraternising widely and vigorously with the élite of the day. But no one was on a footing of unreserved friendship with either of them; both had enemies and detractors even among their close acquaintance. Some of this helps to explain why Lewes and Forster have been jointly neglected. From the biographer’s point of ...”

“... aspirations, and with certain stormy evenings at the Abbey Theatre, made her famous in her day, but it seems that her day has passed. The twenty-odd volumes of her works – dramas, folklore collections, journals – are not often disturbed. She wrote 27 plays as well as four adaptations of Molière, but I gather it ...”

“... of postmodernism: Predock would erect a fortification of rammed earth, to be built by Mexican day labourers. There would also be a vast hotplate: the shimmering air above the plate would create a mirage effect, making the earthwork appear to lift off the ground; but the hotplate would also act as a deterrent, scorching the feet of unauthorised ...”

“... escape its mixed condition of moneybarrel and dream, land of locusts and last tycoons. ‘One day one leaf falls in a damn canyon up there,’ Faulkner growled, ‘and they tell you it’s winter.’ The figure we are looking at, as it happens, is Faulkner, photographed at the Highland Hotel, Hollywood, in 1944. It would help if he was writing The Big ...”

“... Danish immigrant forebears feature in her fiction, but fog had closed the airport. With only a day left he rang me, his attention drawn by the fact that I had a Swedish grandfather and that one of my novels, The Death of the Body, had just been published in a Swedish translation. Such travellers always want one to sum up New Zealand – something as ...”

“... with her publisher, Lord Longford, to straighten out her biography of the Shah. Rather late in the day Lord Weidenfeld suggests that Lord Chalfont take three years off to do a biography of Ashraf! And this after an earlier proposal by Weidenfeld for ‘a kind of Star over China that would put his [the Shah’s] point of view across as Snow’s book had done ...”

“... insight she has been moved to study: ‘now with that scholarship, hindsight and, of course, my day-to-day witnessing of events as they happened . . . I feel able, at last, to tell the whole truth.’ It must also be disturbing to have reached such a stage of maturity and have to confront the fact that for forty years ...”

“... Mouth of the South, as the very unrestrained Mitchell was known, saw palls of smoke rising each day from the centre of Washington. ‘Air pollution around here is perfectly terrible,’ she told Woodward in December 1971. ‘My husband sat here and saw this and said, “You get on the phone and do something about it”’ – advice John Mitchell probably ...”

“... Trelawney went to live at Usk in Wales with his new wife Augusta, where he would sit all day in a lake reading a book. In 1833 he visited Niagara, where he swam the river below the falls, swimming, so he says, ‘without much difficulty’ through the notorious whirlpool in which the Channel swimmer Matthew Webb was to drown nearly fifty years ...”

“... institution ‘quite unlike Westminster’, a gathering ‘by interested parties to discuss the day’s work and any other issues that needed to be talked over’: On either side of a rock-paved lane, Two files of men are standing barefooted, Bearded, waistcoated, each with a tam-o’-shanter On his head, and most with a set half-smile That comes from ...”

“... even the queasy glamour of the truly untouchable. It’s not ‘matter out of place’, as Mary Douglas said of dirt, but matter temporarily out of place, or sort-of-in-place, or might-one-day-be-back-in-place. Public trust in the recycling industry is low, dented by years of scandals over illegal dumping and mass ...”

“... the scribbling classes, from obscure editors of Georgian journals to the wranglings of the modern-day Arts Council. Much of this is fascinating stuff. Taylor can tell you how much Cyril Connolly was paid for a weekly newspaper article in the 1960s, or for how much Anthony Burgess sold the film rights of A Clockwork Orange. The book is crammed with intriguing ...”

“... have had me before now, but … before he can reach me I hear the tick and bolt.’ ‘Some day,’ retorts the bespectacled boatswain Smee, ‘the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the dastardly Hook. Ted Hughes makes use of the story in his poem ‘Tick Tock Tick Tock’, from Remains of Elmet ...”

“... civil disorder (he didn’t much care what sort) to disturb the law-abiding process of election day and throw doubt on any result that might be declared. If it was a close call, he had already indicated in speeches, tweets and interviews that he would do everything in his power to call it into question. On 31 October, the Saturday before the election, he ...”