“... nor English. Both start with a famous paragraph of notable beauty: depicting insomnia in Proust, snow descending on fire in Powell. The first-person singular occurs 15 times in Proust; in Powell, not once. All readers, anywhere, possess an ‘I’ and have experienced sleep or lack of it. No language besides English possesses a one-word equivalent of the ...”

“... beyond reach). There were no ski-lifts, so they had to walk up through the tree line where the snow was less deep, carrying their clunky wooden skis and poles. They worked on ploughing and carving, sharp Christies, controlled avoidance, until Donald was ready to be unleashed, speeding down the course at the edge of the forest, arriving at the bottom ...”

“... There were no planes: Armenia was at war with its neighbour Azerbaijan, and under blockade. Snow came through the ill-fitting windows of the sleeper as it trundled between steep little peaks. When we arrived in Yerevan the next morning it was still dark: the moon had set, and the city, starved of electricity, was blacked out. Only sparse dabs of ...”

“... ends. Her tale of scholarly intrigue and Cold War defamation finds a useful counterpoint in Michael Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1979). In this account, Moby-Dick is not about what 20th-century scholars thought America should become, but about what it became in any case. Ishmael warns us against ‘scouting at ...”

“... with swallows skimming low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the 1940s. It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch. This isn’t wholly imagination either, as it turns out that there was a camp here during the war for American airborne troops, which makes the survival of these wonderfully elaborate pillars, still ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... was a problem, and he began wearing a toupee in the early 1950s.Warhol started to work for Carmel Snow at Harper’s Bazaar. He remembered ‘the humiliation of my bringing up my portfolio’ to her ‘and unzipping it only to have a roach crawl out and down the leg of the table. She felt so sorry for me that she gave me a job.’ His speciality was shoe ...”

“... his or her name marked on them: Kelly, Sabrina, Tracy, John and Stephen. They liked to build a snow wall in the yard at Christmas, to battle the Burcher boys across the street. And they had Easter outfits and lots of swimming at the beach in summer and every kind of sport you can imagine. It sounds like the world of the Kennedys, and not just because of ...”

“... days of writing to the council were long gone, and now he did half-hour interviews with Jon Snow on Channel Four News, unchallenged. (Many people liked being asked to provide opinions, but they didn’t want to be asked to provide evidence, and they gently slid away.) Grenfell United also had the prime minister to talk to. ‘What happened at Grenfell ...”

“... with a publisher with authors like James, Strindberg, Ford and Belloc historically on its list. As Michael Barber, an earlier biographer of Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way. There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of ...”