“... occupation and living wage (a black-humoured task dreamt up for my convalescence by the well-named Richard Gott) arrived 22 years late: in 1968 I sent a memorandum to the then editor proposing a daily warts-and-all profile of a man or woman lately dead – in other words, a Not-the-Times obituary column. Now it is universally agreed in the four serious dailies ...”

“... the measured judgment of Lord Dacre? Was it an impish vulgarisation ventured by Professor Norman Stone? Well, no, it was Nicholas Ridley, of course, nailing back another fag, the better to concentrate his thoughts for the readers of the Spectator. His level of analysis, however, for all the difference of tone, is on the same wavelength as that of Powell’s ...”

“... out – the exact path that a given load was taking through the network of assembled steel and stone. It was certain that the loads, dead and live, were being resisted. As they are today and will be tomorrow. Until they’re not. Another story Galdi liked to tell involved the design of a car park. He was once asked to determine the total load on such a ...”

“... calls ‘the number one id’. Garrigan’s new master is six foot six inches tall and weighs 20 stone. He is in the rudest of health. There is no truth, Garrigan says, in the popular rumour – popular in the West, anyway – that Amin is syphilitic. This is the explanation that the white world contrived for his grandiloquence, his grandiosity: that these ...”

“... his notes: ‘And are you still drinking two bottles of wine a day?’ Some of the best things in Richard Klein’s brilliant, wayward book Eat Fat* are about the way in which the medical profession rushes after certain facts and conclusions while phlegmatically ignoring others. The medical received wisdom which particularly gets his goat is to do with the ...”

“... been lost to the dead hand of over-zealous interpretation and expensive presentation. In 1855, Richard Deakin, a Victorian botanist, published a volume devoted to the species he found growing on and around the Colosseum, a six-acre site which supported 420 different plants. Deakin is one of Woodward’s many unsung heroes. The conjunction of nature and ...”

“... and browse. By 3500 BC, Neolithic people were clearing large areas to make room for their sacred stone circles – and the estimated numbers of their settlements, fields and tracks are constantly being raised. Coates faults the doyen of landscape historians, W.G. Hoskins, for writing in 1955 that ‘vast areas’ of England survived ‘in their natural ...”

“... essay on ‘Jewishness in Music’ is one from whom he stole not just a motif but the foundation-stone of the Ring. To which must be added the foundation-stone of Parsifal (the ‘Dresden Amen’), not to mention debts in the overture to the early opera Die Feen (evoking that to A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and the ...”

“... to think’. He is alluding to McCarthyism and the Cold War. When another radical journalist, I.F. Stone, listened to Eisenhower’s inaugural address, what he heard behind its rhetoric of freedom was the drumbeat of war (although Eisenhower was reluctant to send troops to the region, the build-up to Vietnam would start on his watch). ...”

“... close to a recitation of a catechism, simply asking, for example, ‘how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being.’ But where all his powers were concentrated, Agee could build to more sustained recognitions; as in the intense rendering of the plain faces of a man and a woman: The young man’s eyes had the opal ...”

“... That is what happened to rock music in the late 1960s, when sophisticated critics decided, as Richard Poirier put it, to start ‘learning from the Beatles’. It is what happened to comics, too, in the early 1990s, when the Pulitzer Prize committee invented an award for Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And it has happened to science fiction, where the anointed ...”

“... hilly and indeed mountainous, with the only flat land in the valley bottom criss-crossed with dry-stone walls. Miraculously there was a gap in the cloud and the pilot brought his plane down safely, coming to rest at Orcaber farm near Austwick. Thereafter it was like a scene from an Ealing comedy. Not knowing if the plane was British or German, one of the Home ...”

“... anxiety about how to feel the emotional effect of their sheer magnitude. Too close and we see only stone by stone without taking in the full sweep from base to peak; too far away and we lose the sublime wonder predicated on the sense that something so massive was made discrete block by discrete block. Writing about the ...”

“... the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my ...”

“... read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from detail to ...”