“... 13 January. Having supper in the National Theatre restaurant are Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. ‘I suppose you like this place,’ says Lindsay. I do, actually, as the food is now very good. I say so and Lindsay, who judges all restaurants by the standard of the Cosmo in Finchley Road, smiles wearily, pleased to be reassured about one’s moral decline ...”

“... complicity in the genesis of a scientific theory he detested. But it is more likely, as Katharine Anderson suggests in her engaging and enlightening study of Victorian meteorology, that the depressive Fitzroy was pushed over the edge by a quite different scientific controversy. Could the weather, and more particularly storms, be predicted? As a seaman and a ...”

“... these episodes are a leap into something higher. Scully must disappear because Gillian Anderson is pregnant. Sometimes a punk from Grand Rapids who everyone thinks is English has just gotta have a baby at the age of 24. They hid it for a while with camera angles and increasingly square taupe blazers, but beyond a certain point the secret would be ...”

“... of Waugh is a violent declaration of distance between the two species. I disapproved of his grey suede shoes, his floppy bow tie and the excessive width of his trousers; he struck me as flaccid and petulant and I disliked him on sight. Later he asked me, at second hand, if he could accompany me into the Danakil country, where I planned to travel. I ...”

“... She considers herself in the mirror of her sunglasses, which magnify her breasts. Like Pamela Anderson, she says to herself. The TV lifeguard responsible for transmitting the Californian surfing bug since the beginning of the 1990s.’ This is routine, systematic.Nocilla Lab, the final book, is the formal, as well as the ontological, outlier of the ...”

“... and of history, are worth remembering all the same. Ghervas plans to write her next book on the ‘grey zone’ excluded from the Congress of Vienna, where, as she rightly pointed out in a recent interview, the ‘Eastern Question is more present than ever’: in the military conflicts, flowing or frozen, around the Black Sea in ...”

“... Road, and it was incredible: turquoise sofa, light oak kitchen, black ceramics, cream walls, grey floors and an elegant dado she’d made herself out of black and cream and turquoise mosaic tiles. She writes a lot in her memoir about her mum’s exquisite housewifery and string-picture-making, her own teenage experiments with macramé plant holders and a ...”

“... the arc of their flight, and shoots them to pieces just as they near the earth. The story of Anna Anderson, the most plausible of the pretenders, fully discredited only when her blood samples were posthumously tested for DNA matches, is especially good fun. What is nauseating is the eagerness of a substantial section of the Western public to believe these ...”

“... of the coup in 1960. Adopting fascist methods, it swiftly built up paramilitary squads – the Grey Wolves – far stronger than anything the left could muster, and boasted a constituency twice its size. Nor was this all. As Demirel tacked towards the military, and the elasticity of the political system expanded, a less accommodating Islamism emerged to ...”

“... romances”,’ Stallworthy wrote, ‘he singled out a “dark-haired boy of 16 who had large grey feminine eyes and asked him illicitly to tea”. This romance advanced no further, and Blunt maintained that “Louis was always, totally, irredeemably heterosexual.”’ This is to dismiss the numerous adoring letters to men, and the frequent references to ...”

“... sneaking suspicion that the game was always and already up; that we might, after all, grow old and grey and hear ourselves sounding alarmingly like those class and style enemies, our parents? Hey, let’s have ourselves a past. In Schoolkids Oz, one of the teenage guest editors. Charles Shaar Murray (now a revered, middle-aged rock music critic), issued an ...”

“... all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today showing me her grey mottled legs as if they are a newly completed landscape. She’s particularly pleased with the ulcers she has incorporated into the decorative scheme, displaying them with the relish of a beggar on the streets of Calcutta. In her body-stocking and headband ...”

“... he mentions ‘Bellini’s Roberto Devereux’. Hard on Donizetti, but I suppose all counts look grey in the dark doings of romantic opera. The longest and most significant item is an essay by Margaret Anne Doody connecting Gulliver’s Travels and Virgil’s Georgics. This covers a variety of animal and vegetable themes; the links which it proposes range ...”

“... a one-word equivalent of the kippers, cast on flames, that billow smoke into the wind as the ‘grey, undecided’ snowflakes drift down on them. In Proust the novel proceeds for the next forty pages to describe a scene from the narrator’s childhood, peopled by his family. Every reader was once a child. In Powell, it moves to scenes in a boarding ...”

“... is a self-confessed liar and conman who discovers, while in prison, a history of Australia by M.V. Anderson (Carey’s invention). This history, an extract from which is reproduced, seeks to expose the lie of the country’s origins: Our forefathers were all great liars. They lied about the lands they selected and the cattle they owned. They lied about their ...”