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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was shown on TV. The film, written by the Anglo-Pakistani Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, told the story of Anglo-Pakistani Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) who, tired of being patronised and bullied by his family, decides to get ahead by opening a gleaming new laundrette in South London. Having acquired the necessary start-up cash by ...”

“... total lack of formal education. So she started writing about the law instead, in pieces about the Stephen Ward and Lady Chatterley trials for Esquire, Jack Ruby for Life, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The law, the workings of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a ...”

“... a year or so ago, having gone into a church at Inglesham near Lechlade and found her restoring the wall-painting there.‘Yes,’ she says happily, ‘it was me.’ It seems an extraordinary coincidence. She tells me that two paintings over the fireplace are far from being the daubs I thought they were but reputedly come from Queen Elizabeth I’s state barge ...”

“... guilt-imbued and looking for art to heal the wounds of religion, already a version of Stephen Dedalus? By the end of the book, in self-imposed exile, he’s even answering to the name of Stephen.Other ambitious 20th-century American writers have tried to find a way of synthesising the internal perspective and ...”

“... content to oneAimless for faces rather there than here.Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall,They wake no sleeper; you may hear the windArriving driven from the ignorant seaTo hurt itself on pane, on bark of elmWhere sap unbaffled rises, being Spring;But seldom this. Near you, taller than grass,Ears poise before decision, scenting danger.My teachers ...”

“... cinema. On a visit to Cramond, on the city’s outskirts, he had noticed on the terribly white wall of the public lavatory a lone graffito: ‘Is there nobody queer in Cramond?’ Karl wanted out.It was at Cambridge that I first met him. We were both born in Edinburgh, but his background was working-class and mine was not. That seemed not to matter. Karl ...”

“... dignified, easy-paced, pedagogic. He instructs, he remembers, he references: books on fire by Stephen Pyne of Phoenix, Arizona; a text called Primeval Forest by ‘a biology guy’ called Chris Maser; articles from the Nation on food stamps. Like many American poets inspired by open-field poetics – the monologues, essays and never-ending exchanges of ...”