“... of torrential male urine; of an audience, attired in deepest mourning for the deceased Duke of York, screeching with laughter at a pantomime; and of an awkward moment at court when, as George IV attempts to confer a knighthood, the sword sticks in its scabbard. Unexpectedly, the letters may be most valuable to students of the theatre and of spectacle. They ...”

“... book recognise it in one way or another. Most, like the examples by Helen Garner, David Brooks, Peter Carey, Joan London, Kate Grenville, are admirably achieved on this basis, the authors all born in the Forties or Fifties; and the names indicate that the newer European immigrants have not yet found a voice in their new language. Particularly memorable is ...”

“... anthems Hymn to St Cecilia (classy words by Auden, usefully decent treble solo)♪ and Hymn to St Peter (eerie plainsong effect, also with coveted treble solo opportunity).♪ In the cathedral, thrillingly at night, that enormous building dark and mysterious beyond our spotlit oasis, we thrashed our way through an evening performance of Noye’s ...”

“... it must be said, Wilson had, in the material sense, more to give. When Nabokov arrived in New York in 1940 he was virtually unknown outside émigré Russian circles, but Wilson had been for years an important critical voice, and had a well-deserved reputation as a defender and expositor of new writing. Axel’s Castle had long been famous; To the Finland ...”

“... of the widely-publicised troubles at the International PEN Congress held this January in New York may ironically have been the new timeliness which Norman Mailer’s outbursts bestowed on feminist consideration of masculinity, misogyny and writing. Mailer, president of PEN and chief organiser and fundraiser for the huge writers’ conference, shed his ...”

“... believe that a volume of Saki’s stories, chosen from eight miles of second-hand books in a New York store, saved his life. That, he says in his introduction to this collection, should not be confused with changing his life. Faced with a 22-city promotional tour of America for one of his books (‘Not, you might venture, a deathly predicament in and of ...”

“... of these Russian billionaires had wined and dined European and American leaders and officials. Peter Mandelson, then the EU trade commissioner, and George Osborne, the future chancellor, spent some time on the aluminium mogul Oleg Deripaska’s yacht Queen K off the coast of Corfu in 2008. Queen K, later renamed Clio and now renamed Altair, was in the ...”

“... Sir Peter Medawar is the most distinguished biologist in Britain today. His work on immunology during the 1950s is the inspiration of all modern transplantation surgery, and was judged worthy of a Nobel Prize. In addition to his technical work, he also writes and lectures on science to a broader audience, and with more grace and wit than any one else who has tried his skill in that field ...”

“... McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they think they do.) At a Christmas lunch at the Mirabelle for his Mirror columnists, Morgan remembers ecstatically how ...”

“... using all our senses, as well as spending time in archives, and the editors here – Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith – clearly told their contributors something similar. Like its predecessor, this collection is variable but sparkly, travelling down scholarly alleyways and shooting light into one forgotten corner after another. Best read ...”

“... was offered recently by a young man who goes by the name DJ Whoo Kid, has a radio show on the New York station Hot 97 and produces work with gangsta-rap outfits with names like G-Unit and Lil Scrappy. According to MTV News, ‘Whoo Kid says he originally connected with Bahrain’s royal family when he was recommended to DJ their parties by mutual ...”

“... Christians that had laid waste to the refineries and the surrounding boom town. Crude World is Peter Maass’s account of the violence, tyranny, poverty, environmental degradation, corporate malfeasance, corruption and state failure that seem to be fuelled by oil. By these lights, what happened in Baku might be taken as confirmation of the ‘resource ...”

“... flame) has been observed as frequently as legend suggests, and it is not clear whether or not Peter Mayle himself witnessed the burning of the ten-pound note that had masqueraded as a tip (although he claims that the perpetrator of the deed is a friend). But why then does this legend persist? Presumably because, for some, the idea of wealth, power and ...”

“... seeing through performance, in life as in art. When he was running the theatrical workshop in New York where he found the actors and developed the ideas for his first movie, Shadows (1957-59), he told an interviewer that most experiences in life are as ‘staged’ and ‘artificial’ as most dramatic performances, and that the problem ‘for modern ...”

“... in his Yale class, but his classmates thought of him as a nice one. He wrote in the New York Times about his admiration for Barack Obama, and a classmate, Sofia Nelson, remembers that whatever Vance’s qualms about abortion, ‘what he relayed to me is what his grandmother had taught him, which is that you can never know what situation a woman is ...”