“... the one hand, extreme paucity of paraphrasable content; on the other, extreme subtlety of nuance. Andrew Frisardi illustrates the first difficulty rather painfully when, in the introduction to this new Selected Poems, he attempts to say what ‘Mattina’ ‘literally means’: ‘something like “I turn luminous in an immensity of spaces.”’ But ...”

“... Jamaican woman and the white plantation owner who had raped her. After he left Jamaica as a young man, Wedderburn never returned for fear of being hanged: ‘such’, he wrote of the plantocracy, ‘is their hatred of anyone having black blood in his veins.’ No one tried to hang him in Britain on account of his race, but he never outran the fear and ...”

“... next Prime Minister but three’. But the mind’s eye can be wrong – Johnson’s biographer, Andrew Gimson, records that Boris was a quiet boy who had hearing difficulties – and it may be that the reason we can readily conceive Johnson aged seven is that the public persona of Johnson aged 47 is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys. With Livingstone the ...”

“... in dire financial straits (Chekhov knew them) who pin their hopes on a shrewd and successful young lawyer friend. He will marry their daughter and somehow get them out of the mess. Naturally cynical and self-absorbed, the young man is nonetheless sentimentally attracted to the daughter. But it would be a ...”

“... Penguin of 1962, The New Poetry, selected and introduced by A. Alvarez. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion are well aware that there is something comically factitious about the stance that has to be adopted by each new spokesman on the poetry scene – ‘we are not,’ they say, ‘the first anthologists this century to have made such a claim.’ Indeed ...”

“... its contrived banality, Armstrong’s ‘small step’ is in every dictionary of quotations, and Andrew Smith is of the remarkable opinion that the First Sentence is ‘one of the most memorable lines ever offered the English language’ and ‘as famous as anything Shakespeare wrote’. Of the 12 Moon-walkers, only Schmitt was a scientist, and none of them ...”

“... catastrophic showing at their first TV debate, then Trump had survived a volley of bullets from a young lone-wolf member of his own party, and then, on the first day of the convention, a judge in Florida had dismissed the federal criminal case against him for hoarding classified government documents at his Palm Beach estate. He has other cases to face, but ...”

“... Revolutionary Paris. The party included the Duke’s mistress, Lady Elizabeth Foster, and his four young children, two of them by Lady Elizabeth, whose company Georgiana ‘for reasons best known to herself ... loved more than that of any living soul’. Georgiana’s mother, Countess Spencer, was also in the group, for the Devonshire Set was nothing if not ...”

“... before a pierglass; we might imagine these objects that once belonged to a beautiful, famous, sad, young woman, can tell us something strange and true about our own lives. The people who queued to see her things around the world were apt to say such a thing. The eternal-seeming fabulousness of a great movie star – like that of a princess – might serve for ...”

“... round his head and narrowing his eyes like Edith Sitwell. There was one devotee in particular, a young man who spent his recreational periods at our school thumping first-years and selling single cigarettes, and I watched as he paid homage to this camp bedazzler onstage and danced around with unfettered joy wearing his mother’s beads. I had no choice but ...”

“... wife, Lesley Harrison. Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. He was six months old when Lesley’s brother Colin overdosed on schizophrenia medication while on temporary release from psychiatric care. Lesley’s father had committed ...”

“... like a rough and immense sea in Orsino’s opening speech, Olivia weeps saltwater tears, Maria and Andrew parry ‘dry jests’, Cesario is ‘standing water’ and encouraged to ‘hoist sail’: ‘no, good swabber,’ he replies, ‘I am to hull it here a little longer.’ The maritime imagery continues. This is a play that can’t forget the sea voyage ...”

“... heir, King Abdallah II. Spectators could almost hear Hafez al-Assad of Syria whispering into the young King’s ear: ‘Your father knew it wasn’t personal, Abdu. It was business.’ The Sicilian Mafia has much to learn from the Levantine men of honour. Those who could come did: scions of the Saudi royal family, Netanyahu, Mubarak, past and present ...”

“... Woolf’s metaphor comes readily to mind). The heroine of the first story is a child, a talented young actress, exiled by her talent from the companionships of childhood, tiptoeing defensively round the rumbling adult realm of intrigues and antagonisms, but coming at last into her own, her private space – and indeed her position of power – when she puts ...”

“... was a very different newspaper in 1986 from the one which fought for thalidomide children. When Andrew Neil became Rupert Murdoch’s surprise appointment as Sunday Times editor in 1983, almost his first act was to sack the editor of Insight, the centre of the paper’s investigative work in the previous two decades, and disband the team. The Insight rubric ...”