“... played her friends off against each other, telling one person what another had done for her (‘David brought me a bottle of champagne and kept his taxi waiting’), I now see as the neediness of a greedy child who didn’t have enough childhood and who was longing for her own father to love her. (Janet re-met her father at the age of 16 on a self-arranged ...”

“... relations with ITN,’ concludes Ingham, ‘were much easier. I got on extremely well with Sir David Nicholas and Sir Alastair Burnet and Sue Tinson.’ No wonder. Burnet was a legendary Thatcher-worshipper and Sue Tinson was once a candidate for the job of Head of Information at Tory Central Office. On page 366, Sir Bernard declares his hatred for ‘the ...”

“... if controversial’, although, as I see it, justice could be done to them only by a writer like David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. It seems evident to me that their work is for the most part based on a very small element of truth whose significance is inflated out of all proportion, that facts buttressing the case are carefully selected, and all the evidence ...”

“... and further in the labs, using mirrors in interiors to reflect sunlight as a sole source ... There may be a small queue of cinematographers shuffling forward now with hands raised to claim equal credit in these endeavours. What is true is that Almendros used the methods as thoroughly and successfully as anyone, and was bold about applying them in major ...”

“... We would like some examples of ‘the witty and highbrow artistic references’ which her friends, David and Jeremy, bandied about. But all we hear of Jeremy’s thoughts, when he and Rosie ‘tumble’ into bed, is that he thinks ‘fate had brought them together and they’d met in another lifetime.’ Jeremy is respectfully described as a ‘Cambridge ...”

“... surprising. Determining the ‘source’ of a river is, it turns out, not a simple matter. There may be many plausible contenders. You can argue that it is the joining together and accumulation of the water from a number of tributaries that constitutes the ‘source’, not any one of them in particular. This issue gave pause even to Victorian explorers, not ...”

“... and folk tales are clumsy and blundering and foolish, and their strength doesn’t always prevail: David fells Goliath with a slingshot (like a child in a bombsite playground), and poor boy Jack can outwit the ogre at the top of the beanstalk, however big and strong and vicious and rich he is, and make off with the golden goose. Such stories are popular ...”

“... But in his own eyes he remained the gangling, untidy public school rebel, still recognisable in David Hockney’s official portrait of him as Provost. ‘Quirky, unpredictable, a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey Richards said that he ...”

“... sojourn in Surinam: ‘But she was never afraid, she said. Never once hesitated; though her memory may have colored [sic] her original experience. She drank in every detail ...’ There is nothing resembling Maureen Duffy’s grasp (the result of deep study of the state papers, the point at which the amanuensis flinched) of the complex international, national ...”

“... whose savage pamphlet, often right about details and mostly wrong about the larger issues, may have helped to produce the fortunate effect of Nietzsche’s becoming a philosophical writer rather than remaining a philologist – though he was already set on that course before he published The Birth of Tragedy. Their commentary also provides information ...”

“... was meant as a score for painting, poetry, objects, events or music, although these categories may also be a provocation in themselves (if you’re burying a cloud in the garden, is it an event or a poem?). Ono’s own subversive gestures have been recuperated by the institutions at which they were directed. In the winter of 1971, she placed adverts in ...”

“... acknowledges, on research done for other projected and equally unauthorised lives of Hammett by David Fechheimer and William Godschalk, and upon material gathered by William Nolan, editor of Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. In other words, Shadow Man emerges from a background of intrigue: prolonged scuffling in the literary undergrowth and a growing sense of ...”

“... a scarcity value, it is possible that early man drew it into his protective fold. Domestication may even represent the acceptance of a long-standing association between man and animal which was of mutual benefit. Undoubtedly, without domestication – ‘the greatest conservation movement of all time’, as David Harris ...”

“... Some, like ‘Aesthetics of Comedy Asleep’, are mere squibs: ‘Don’t wake the clown/Or he may knock you down.’ Others like the witty ‘Aesthetics of Surrealism’ – ‘To find the impossible/With breasts’ – are near-Wildean aphorisms which simply flash by. But however substantial they are, all of the pieces, like tasty canapés, can be ...”

“... the Guardian and Granada journalists looked glum. The former MP (he lost his safe seat in the May landslide) was lying all right, but he was lying with such charm, verve and enthusiasm that he looked and sounded like a winner. The case seemed lost. The dramatic story of how Aitken was finally defeated by his own lies is superbly set out in the final ...”