“... ear. Two men together in a car being swept by searchlights. This was the episode in which Bryan Cranston plays a man tormented by a piercing hum that will make his head explode unless he drives west as fast as possible. Cranston was the actor my co-writer, Heidi Schreck, had picked to play my father in our planned adaptation of my book about ...”

“... signing the Official Secrets Act, she was employed by the Political Warfare Executive at Milton Bryan, which pumped out ‘detailed truth with believable lies’, and was intended (like the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw from the other side) to rot enemy morale. She was there for less than six months, but it sensitised her to the fine line between ...”

“... that libertas is ‘from the Latin word for freedom’, but on the same page introduces the poet Bryan Waller Proctor without adding that he wrote under the pseudonym Barry Cornwall. He has an unprofessorial habit of vague assertion: ‘At the close of the 18th century the economic status of the middle class was insecure.’ His logical grasp can’t be ...”

“... Mor Light flashes asternDead on its second.‘I wanted to write about the sea and make it a grey green sea, not a chocolate box sea,’ he told Charles Causley, and he clearly considered himself to have succeeded on those terms, whatever else the poem might also convey about the mysteries of being. It was, he said, ‘the most definite sea poem in the ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... boyfriend Junior, whose hair runs ‘the gamut from chrome red through tea-rose pink to an Edenic green’, seem larger than life. Rieti’s face, we are told, ‘had a real, if fleshy, force, a real personality. It resembled the kind of face one might see in a gallery of portraits of the century’s petrified luminaries of ...”

“... as its more notorious female ones’. Mailer, apparently, ‘reacted extremely badly’ in the green room afterwards, making all sorts of threats. But the two men made up again in the aftermath of the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses. ‘Never to be outdone when the electricity of violence was in the ...”

“... a more docile Parsi candidate, Mancherjee Bhownaggree, for the nearby constituency of Bethnal Green). Radicalised by defeat, Naoroji became an open and unapologetic advocate for swaraj, or self-rule, and backed emancipatory causes around the world. In India, anticolonialism acquired new force in 1905 after the British partitioned Bengal in a clear ...”

“... Second World War. Yet when he writes about his years in Guatemala in the Fifties (setting for Dark Green, Bright Red), he admits to great shock at the discovery of what American intervention in the southern hemisphere had really been like. Now, Williams Jennings Bryan and Colonel Lindbergh had not been opposed to the Monroe ...”

“... you really can get on fentanyl.It is the time of assassins. Benjie waits in the wood by the 14th green, ghost gun poking through the leaves. He’s listening for cart wheels and the man calling ‘Caddie, Mr President’. He cries a little. His curls are combed for the Perp Walk. Aim for the ear.The spectacle knows itself, after a fashion. It likes to nod ...”

“... protagonists at the Scopes trial: Scopes, Clarence Darrow who defended him and William Jennings Bryan who tried to have him sent to jail. Garretto’s dignified, floating Calvin Coolidge head (1928) elevates the colourless President, and although the anorexic, pimpled, almost mouthless ‘silent Cal’ in Covarrubias’s 1925 caricature is perhaps the ...”

“... Sherlock) ‘pursuer’ of his subject. But he offers a vivid account of a visit he made to Kensal Green Cemetery as he began work on his biography. It was December (the month in which the novelist died): Thackeray’s grave on the south side, where the tractors are out on the path, is difficult to find. Stumbling over the freshly dug turf, holding my coat ...”

“... art colleges, and it came back out with a fresh vigour and shot through with a lot of new ideas.Bryan Ferry was taught by Richard Hamilton, whose mentor was Marcel Duchamp. Pop art took the capital of popular culture and reinvested it; pop culture took Pop art as its exemplar and reapplied it: a marvellous feedback loop. ‘Virginia Plain’ was based on ...”

“... in the Chapel Royal, St James’s on 11 May 1920: ‘Cimmie’s wedding dress had a design of green leaves in it, in defiance of a superstition that green at a wedding was unlucky: there was also a superstition that it was unlucky to be married in May. Cimmie herself chose the music: during the handing-over of the ring ...”

“... progressive activists. ‘Both parties do the same thing, one covertly, one overtly,’ he told a Green Party gathering in 2001. ‘Which one is going to get more people mad? Which one is going to get more people organised?’ The questions depend on a familiar leftist cliché – the worse things get, the better they get. But if Nader’s dismissal of the ...”