“... life to his girlfriend (‘one confession veiling the next’), and the whole truth turns out to be a narration of the lies he has told. The first of Rayner’s untruths squirms into our heads like one of those children’s stories which are intended to show how dangerously lies can escalate. He is at a boarding-school in North Wales when a friend mentions a ...”

“... According to the caption, this is a ‘Celebration of Ramadan, from “The Meetings” illustrated by al-Hariri, 13th century’. Oh no it isn’t. Al-Hariri, author of the Maqamat (literally ‘Standings’, but more usually translated as ‘Sessions’) died in 1122. The painting is actually by the 13th-century artist ...”

“... children again, in Living in a Big Way. In 1951, he taught the kids how to dance in Paris. So that by the time he came to make Singin’ in the Rain (1952), he had perfected a childlike quality in his own performance. In order to express his good mood in the title number, he ‘thought of the fun children have splashing about in rain puddles and decided to ...”

“... now close to perfection. To make representations look deceptively real, and to remain untroubled by considerations of what ‘real’ could possibly mean, was the aim of the artist, and the function of the critic was simply to admire the technical accomplishments that made the illusion credible. You could also express an admiring or even a disgusted interest ...”

“... times and places, even the ones written yesterday and just down the road. But these three works by Kenzaburo Oë, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, have an unusual flavour of missives cast into the sea long ago, only now arriving on our island beach. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published in Japan in 1958, and is now translated for the ...”

“... four days (having earlier conceived the plot during a restless night in Tokyo, when he was visited by a shimmering vision of Gertrude Lawrence). Four days to write a classic comedy was good going, but he had already written Hay Fever in three. In 1941, when hard up, he withdrew to the Italianate folly of Portmeirion in Wales (presumably festooned in barbed ...”

“... so controlled chaos governs the massive task of decamping from Bad Kreuznach to Tuzla. Nash will be running the American sector of Ifor (the Implementation Force), an area which includes one of the most fiercely contested territories of the Bosnian war, the Posavina Corridor. The General’s operational bible is the first part of the Military Annex of the ...”

“... imperative’, an enterprise more vulgarly known as the Death Railway, planned and carried through by the Japanese Imperial Army. At any point in history a logistic imperative is something to be avoided at all costs, whether it involves cutting the Americas in two or building St Petersburg in a freezing swamp. It is familiar ...”

“... It is easy to conjure up landscapes of the past peopled by holy fools, and to suppose that medieval times were full of simpleton jesters, and boy bishops leading rites of inversion and showing how all sinners were equal in God’s eyes. It is equally easy to imagine a subsequent darkening of the plain – the old Christian reverence for simplicity yielding to the carceral project of modernity, Foucault’s great confinement ...”

“... world’, claims he can help prevent such collapses, a view shared (for varying periods of time) by Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Monica Seles, Mary Pierce, Jim Courier, Anna Kournikova and Mark Philippousis, among others. Exactly how, though, on the evidence of this as-told-to memoir, remains a mystery. Who needs the world’s best tennis coach to ...”

“... that ‘the educational establishment are gnawing away at this Bill like rats in a cellar.’ By the simple process of locking us all in a cellar, the Government has produced unity between people who would not normally have agreed with each other in a thousand years. Max Beloff, speaking in the House of Lords, once exclaimed in grief: ‘I agree with ...”

“... Not long afterwards the producer died suddenly and that was that. The scarlet Woolsack, described by John Wells as ‘a sofa sacred to the law’, plays a sit-on part throughout this book. Though periodically restuffed with Commonwealth wool, it retains all the ‘ritual magic’ of medieval days. During the Gordon Riots of 1780 it was the holy refuge on ...”

“... among the reporters covering his heavyweight title fight with Floyd Patterson in 1962. Intimidated by Listen’s criminal record and connections with organised crime, the press took his sullenness for the recalcitrance of an underworld brawler. The former heavyweight champion is no less threatening in Thom Jones’s two previous collections of short ...”

“... pubs in the London area were named ‘The Three Johns’ – Wilkes and Horne were assisted by a lawyer, John Glynn – and at least one, in Islington, still bears the name today. Horne now became a full-time politician, though he accepted that his clerical status debarred him from elective office. He was a leading figure in the Bill of Rights ...”

“... was 477 pages long. Depending on how the next volume pans out, the complete Life is going to be at least treble and possibly quadruple the size of your average biography of Auden, Eliot or Pound, and might even outdo the Bible, which was of course written by divers hands, over a 1500-year period, and may have been ...”