“... and semen behind his art and life deodorised away. In many ways, Smith is still the teenage Patti Lee, who stuck texts and pics and reproductions on her New Jersey bedroom wall in a crazy-paved collage of British Invasion pop, Catholic symbology and European art: saints and sinners and sexy English singers. She’s a soul collector, still indulging her artsy ...”

“... to power. In 2002, the Bush Administration seemed to think the candidate of the old ruling party, Lee Hoi Chang, had a lock on the next Presidential election; when he came to Washington in the autumn, the Administration treated him like a king. Instead, the Korean people elected Roh Moo Hyun, a courageous lawyer who had defended many dissidents against the ...”

“... through one of the actresses there met and began taking classes with Allan Miller, a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She auditioned for Strasberg’s Actors Studio aged sixteen, and though she didn’t get in they encouraged her to try again later; piqued, she never did. When she left school in January 1960, she had her first role ‘off-off-off-Broadway’.The ...”

“... to do given some of the obstacles to satisfaction she faced. Born in Melbourne, Garland was the child of respectable but dull and philistine parents – a well-to-do businessman father, a distant fashion-plate mother, who while ‘sensuously impressive’ was ‘inadequately loving’. Like her contemporary Edith Sitwell, Garland suffered as a ...”

“... One afternoon​ in September last year I took the bus from Leicester to Coalville to visit Lee Knifton. He is a carer with an organisation called Shared Lives Plus, which matches people who need care – people who, thirty years ago, would have been institutionalised – with a caring lay person who has room in their home and their life to take ...”

“... and ‘Love Is Blue’ – grimly laid down as puberty loomed – don’t count.) Pepper was a child prodigy. Though neglected and unloved (his parents split up and basically dumped him) he got hold of a clarinet and taught himself to play. By the age of 14 he was sitting in on clarinet and sax in jazz clubs all around LA. After a short stint in the Army ...”

“... I have loved mentally, and some physically.’ Two years after their wedding, the Channons’ only child, Paul, was born, but eighteen months later ‘we broke off conjugal relations, never in our case particularly successful.’ By then Honor was increasingly absent on supposed skiing holidays – one of them in July – and Channon eventually realised that ...”

“... crime as an intuitive revolt against racism. But he was also – in Hilton Als’s words – ‘a child of the bourgeoisie in love with the stars in the gutter’, and the gutter nearly swallowed him up. In 1928, he robbed a couple in Cleveland of four rings worth $5000, and was arrested the next day in a pawnshop. The police forced a confession out of him by ...”

“... meant that he was put in a class with boys a year older. If you were designing a formula to make a child a target for bullying, you couldn’t do much better. On his first night, Huang’s roommate pulled up his shirt to show him the scars he had accumulated from knife wounds. The newcomer, who stayed at school during the holidays because he had nowhere else ...”

“... in the semi-authentic antiquarian bookshops groaned as hustlers with bulging golf carts and child buggies lurched in off the street. ‘We’ve got books. Got ‘em all. Cellar’s full. Sorry.’ Book graveyards are all that remains of Greenwich’s punt at culture. The theatre, in want of a few hundred thousand pounds of Lottery money, has been closed ...”

“... dinner in Davos attended by Eric Schmidt from Google; inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee; the boss of Vodafone, Vittori Colao; the former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt; the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman; and Fadi Chehadé, the CEO of the body charged with co-ordinating the internet.’ It’s worth dwelling on this, because the position ...”

“... the Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a bonny briar bush in the lee of a house with green shutters’.For its fans, however, Sunset Song is simply ‘a story of a Scotland that … is no more – and yet … still lives in the hearts of each and every one of us’, as Nicola Sturgeon wrote in her preface for a new edition in ...”

“... one member in a partnership with producers, retailers and consumers. The consumer is still the child-sorcerer of market democracy, sweet-toothed and capricious, gaining weight by the meal and ready to throw it about: government can’t quite face off against us. Well, not yet – but there’s a strong hint that in Defra’s thinking ‘choice’ is no ...”

“... and his own capacity to achieve it. His destiny was to be a deeply disappointed man, until Lee Harvey Oswald intervened to redeem him. (I am assuming that Johnson had nothing to do with the assassination, as does Caro, who says that in his many years of research he has found nothing to suggest any involvement or foreknowledge on Johnson’s part. You ...”

“... sentence ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’; and the tricycle ride by his sensitive child, Danny, in the vacant hotel, along the vast reaches of the floor, around corners that will lead to a place that is not nice at all. The Steadicam, mounted low behind him but creeping forward as he pedals, is a stroke of craft; and when Danny is stopped by ...”