“... heating system.) Nothing but the Night, by contrast, is insistently vague. It opens with a seven-page dream sequence, and it’s filled with descriptions that resemble ambitious stage directions: ‘His face was a twisted mask where incommunicable pity and hate struggled vainly with contempt and unacknowledged love.’ Maxley’s trauma serves as a licence ...”

“... After that, he is barely mentioned, until he reappears on the very last page (page 715) of the book. Ana Ozores, a bored wife, torn between the desires of the flesh and the desire for religious meaning, has fainted in the cathedral after a final confrontation with her hulkingly sexy ...”

“... team’. In an important sense, however, it surely does not matter who actually wrote what, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, phrase by phrase (or even joke by joke). No more than Churchill did Thatcher draft every word published in her name. Yet her memoirs have been created by a team whom she superintended and ...”

“... a statement he had made about the respective bids for Westland. The Sun ran the story on its front page in early January 1986 under the headline ‘You Liar!’ (‘Tarzan gets rocket from top law man’). Two days later Heseltine walked out of cabinet, declaring ‘there has been no collective responsibility in the discussion of these matters. There has been ...”

“... phrase is the only entry for a day. And it can appear as often as four or five times on a single page. Borges and Bioy first met at the end of 1931 or the beginning of 1932. They wrote stories together, compiled anthologies, edited series, annotated classics, wrote screenplays, and had free-flowing and often extremely witty (if rather cruel) literary ...”

“... percussion), the micro-tonal composer and vagabond Harry Partch, and the prolific symphonist Alan Hovhaness. He also met Moholy-Nagy, who invited him to teach a course at his New Bauhaus School (later the Institute of Design) in Chicago. Cage delivered an ambitious series, described in the trimester handbook as the ‘exploration and use of new sound ...”

“... of males, a character created from a mixture of Mr Rochester, Clark Gable, Casanova, the late Alan Clark MP, and – apparently – various dashing and extant English aristocrats, including Andrew Parker Bowles. Rupert Campbell-Black, wealthy landowner, sometime world champion showjumper, sometime Tory MP and sports minister, exuder of brio, glamour and ...”

“... perhaps what nasty things can go on in what Margaret Thatcher’s well-bred Minister of State, Alan Clark, tastefully described as Bongo Bongo Land. They should read this, from Kochan and Whittington’s little book: ‘BCCI made hay out of the London connection. Arabs from the newly-enriched Gulf States came to the UK to enjoy the casinos, buy ...”

“... of government glimmers of far less savoury right-wing popularists from the recent past. It was Alan Clark (he of the dog called Eva Braun) who drooled over her ‘personality compulsion, something of the Führer Kontakt’. And it George Younger, then Secretary of State for Scotland, who remarked of her post-Falklands address to the Scottish Conservative ...”

“... William Walton, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, Elisabeth Lutyens, John Lehmann, Louis Macneice, Alan Rawsthorne, Michael Ayrton. In the dark background are the diabolic Bernard Van Dieren and Philip Heseltine (‘Peter Warlock’), two men, composer-writers like himself, to whom Lambert maintained a fierce loyalty, before and after their deaths. Lambert’s ...”

“... what’s meant here – technology embracing the new frontier, and so on. But as it comes off the page, the rhapsody, like other flights in the novel, is both flat and overwritten. Presumably it rolls with fine mimetic thunder in the original Russian. More successful is the pastoral’s Perdita episode, handled with earthy comedy and unflinching ...”

“... threatened the Chinese with atomic weapons not long before the truce was agreed. On his last page, Rees states in a caption: ‘the US decision not to resort to atomic weapons may have averted a third world war.’ Groehler and other Communist sources claim that the US also used germ weapons. These charges have usually been dismissed in the West but they ...”

“... who recalls his summer as the little boy running between the secret lovers, Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Redgrave’s gaze in that film is watery and blank, which seems right for a man so psychologically traumatised by childhood memories that he had shut down his emotions. In retrospect, though, this had less to do with acting than with the Parkinson’s ...”

“... through the roof of the burning building, and departs for New Zealand. In a prefatory note Robert Alan Jamieson calls his book ‘a yarn’, and if the yarn doesn’t read too convincingly it is perhaps because he is chiefly interested in other things: the face of external nature in Shetland, and the quality of life – narrow, enduring, heroic – exhibited ...”

“... the same case and more than ever aware of its faults and deficiencies. Things start to go wrong on page two. It is an odd treatise on political economy which, by this stage, is already deeply into the national crisis occasioned by ... the breakdown of royal marriages, which, apparently, are ‘symbolic of the age’. It is all so pantingly retailed: the ...”