“... the homes and houses of the Germans.’ Nigel Hamilton, in this robust last volume of his 2732-page trilogy, does not reproduce these orders, which surely have more than a touch of the touching about them. Here was a soldier who had commanded almost a million men in the field and taken the surrender of a million men (‘A million chaps! Good ...”

“... heart about it.’ Identities cross, compete, combine. Marni Nixon remembers: ‘It’s funny. Alan Jay Lerner said in his biography that I dubbed Gigi, which I didn’t. It was Betty Wand.’ Do you see how stars change places, a fair lady mise-en-abîme stretching from Betty Wand to Colette? This star intertextuality is something that readers and viewers ...”

“... stranger in a nearby compartment and a threesome in a steambath. It’s dreamily soft-focus on the page, as if Houellebecq has lost belief in the entire project and is writing a little light porn to amuse himself. It just so happens that, besides being young, rich and sexually ravenous, and having ‘superb breasts, round and high, so swollen and firm that ...”

“... the influence of Martin Amis’s Money. Neither St Aubyn nor his obvious colleague-in-style Alan Hollinghurst is interested in Amis’s jaggy riffs, but here and there the sardonic placement of a perfect, electric adjective or noun, or the ironically self-conscious stoicism of a delicately weighted verb, suggest something of Amis, as in the verb ...”

“... For the devoted toff, effort and compassion are embarrassing in life and horrific on the printed page. The English upper orders learned from Oscar Wilde how to abhor earnestness and embrace triviality, but even Wilde would appear strained next to the Mitfords. The lesson of the girls: it’s not what one says but how one says it. English prose is in love ...”

“... notably the trials of Lord Montagu, Bill Field (a promising Labour MP) and, most tragically, Alan Turing, the progenitor of modern computing, whose arrest in 1952 precipitated ‘a slow, sad descent into grief and madness’ ending in suicide. Once in jail, homosexuals were often given electric shock treatment and oestrogen to cure them of their ...”

“... of social and political habits which can be unsettled and perhaps dislodged by radical work on the page. For some of these ‘elective outsiders’, as Sinclair calls them, quality time at the keyboard is conceived as a challenge to power: the poem is a flamboyant descent into the street, part Pentecost, part June Days – old allegiances among the poets run ...”

“... kind of fall: tragic early death. He wrote books about the CIA and the Pentagon, on Clinton and Alan Greenspan, carrying on at the Post as well, making a name for himself as a reporter and author others wished to emulate. He’d brought down a president: journalistically, what can beat that? He’s now more famous and must be wealthier than any other ...”

“... Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst, who had sold five ...”

“... Climate change denial prepared the ground for this.Not everyone found Latour convincing. For Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in Impostures intellectuelles (1997), he was merely a dabbler in the sciences. In Science of Science and Reflexivity (2001), Pierre Bourdieu – his most dedicated critic – scolded him for finding ideas more interesting than ...”

“... that’s reason enough to include Burroughs, who appears with Göring on the drug’s Wikipedia page, though this hardly suggests the struggle ‘over every little detail’ recorded by Labatut’s acknowledgments page.‘Prussian Blue’ jumps back and forth in time as it weaves together themes of paint and ...”

“... It is like an evening spent in a restaurant – let’s say Olwen’s French Club, mentioned on page one, a latterday refuge of the Chelsea set – listening to a story of mutual friends. And it is a trip in its own right, on the teller’s part. T. Behrens gives the impression that he has more to say about himself than the progress of this mad love – to ...”

“... that its title song (sung by Remick) is his ‘personal statement’. This makes for a nervous page in the book, discussing the lyric that concludes: What’s hard is simple, What’s natural comes hard. Maybe you could show me How to let go, Lower my guard, Learn to be free. Maybe if you whistle, Whistle for me. ‘To believe that “Anyone Can ...”

“... it is effectively a colony. The locals have had their town bought up around them. On the first page 15-year-old Silas is described as having a job ‘yanking weeds from flowerbeds and patios for rich New Yorkers’. He’s not an exemplary employee, as he is stoned most of the time, but that’s not the point. As Edith the florist puts it, ‘the ...”

“... and paintings. Furthermore Wack has provided eighty pages of little-known Latin text and facing-page translation, thrusting forward the evidence for anyone who wants to argue. And who can argue with the thought that ‘primary sources deserve to be better known’ because they shape the culture’s ‘sexual discourse’? The debate over ‘courtly ...”