“... Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ever think about Leopold Bloom and the Kilkenny People or Stephen Daedalus and the ghost of Hamlet’s father, even if I decide to walk the route down Kildare Street and past the National Library. I studied in the National Library almost every weekday between 1973 and 1975, and it is easier to wonder who stole my yellow ...”

“... songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi’s ‘Only a Man Harrowing Clods’ to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an engorged, unseemly longing for things unseen.Yet something about my fixation has ...”

“... was probably what fuelled the King Mob operatives who daubed the long-lasting graffiti on a wall running alongside the Tube line between Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park: ‘Same thing day after day – tube – work – dinner – work – tube – armchair – TV – sleep – tube – work – how much more can you take? – one in ten go mad, one ...”

“... was ‘largely autobiographical’. In it, he described his father’s attempted suicide after the Wall Street Crash: And then one day there was discovered missing My brother’s bottle of Phenobarbital – And, as it later turned out, a razor blade. The poem also outlined his brother’s physical problems: A heartless regimen of exercises Performed upon a ...”

“... It’s high up. The first church I went to in Bellaghy was just a pulpit sticking out of a wall.MILLER: It is high up. Halfway up to heaven.Seamus climbed up to the pulpit. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘why hast thou forsaken me?’ The trees seemed to have something to say at the window. The countryside was pressing in again. Someone’s spectacles sat on ...”

“... The establishment had their own representative in Cyrus Vance, a Second World War veteran, Wall Street lawyer and professional diplomat, whom Carter appointed secretary of state. Vance and his staff were justifiably sobered by the futility and mendacity of the Vietnam War. They wanted to dial back the grandiosity of America’s global ambition by ...”

“... in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as ...”

“... organisation. De Loach took this as a direct threat from Johnson. In his preface to the Diaries, Stephen Ambrose rightly says that this Nixonite approach to LBJ in 1973 was ‘prospective blackmail’. He also notes that the italic deletion cited above is ‘the only place in the book where an example is given of a deletion by the National Security Council ...”

“... at home and wanted to make a private call it had to be on the shop phone, which was mounted on the wall with a separate mouth and earpiece. So some of one’s intimate moments were played out amid sawdust and blood.2 February. An environmentally sensitive bus named after me in Leeds. I just wish it could have been a tram.9 March. I am reading Colm Tóibín’s ...”

“... in the stage play in the 1920s; Michelle Pfeiffer, also fifty, was, as ever, Michelle Pfeiffer in Stephen Frears’s film version of 2009). The curtains are pink, as are the paper shades on the electric sconces and the ‘ravishing’ flesh of the nymphet in the painting on the wall. And Léa’s dressing-gown, and her ...”

“... and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely ‘gurgled and giggled’, he apparently came across as ...”

“... pivotal events of the century, a setting-up of sides for the Second World War. Philby, along with Stephen Spender, Hugh Gaitskell, Naomi Mitch-ison, the American journalist John Gunther and many others, was horrified to see the Austrian regular army shelling the workers’ flats in Karl-Marx-Stadt, and readily agreed with his new Communist girlfriend, Litzi ...”

“... better than Hardy does, in his poem ‘The Going’: ‘while I/Saw morning harden upon the wall.’ One can see, with the help of these lines, the light becoming more solid, more densely itself; and of course our mornings harden in a different way, too: our days tend to begin loose with possibility, and then harden around us as the lost hours progress ...”

“... crackdown on atheists and heretics, a 53-line doggerel poem was pinned to the churchyard wall of the London church frequented by Dutch Protestant refugees. Known as the ‘Dutch Church libel’, it survives only in a single manuscript copy (now in the Bodleian). Chiming with other recent anonymous attacks on the Protestant asylum seekers whose ...”

“... Warner Brothers studio next to the Harry Potter set, but they don’t stay long. Painted on the wall of the Indian restaurant that now occupies most of St Albans’s Liberal Club is a fleeting endorsement: ‘Really enjoyed the lobster curry – Tom Cruise.’Damian Boys is a former Conservative supporter turned Lib Dem. I met him at his semi-detached house ...”