“... support system of the original story.’ I feel he’s mistaken in that. With the exceptions of ‘Holly’ and ‘An Artist’, these 20 pieces need all the support they can get. They are either unintelligible –So the twine unwinds and loosely widensbackward through areas that forwardedunderstandings of all I would undertake –or all too intelligible:They ...”

“... singers like Bill Hayley, Elvis Presley and the most marked white influence on the Beatles, Buddy Holly, it was the original black music which ‘changed our lives when we heard it’ and knew ‘it was something strong and powerful and beautiful.’ And the particular R and B Lennon favoured went unreported in the Melody Maker and unplayed on the BBC ...”

“... Spa had reflected, as Greer was to do, on ‘what ghastly lives some people lead.’ Alice James was thinking, not of her neighbours in Holly Walk, but of the basket-weaver’s family which provided the household with eggs: 15 children, a father who had ‘not been sober since Christmas’ (it was June), a ...”

“... staged and photographed. The idea, for instance, of a café where the waiters impersonate Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Donna Reed, Martin and Lewis and so on, is funnier than the filming of a set where people do this. When Travolta, eating here with Uma Thurman, orders the Douglas Sirk steak, the joke is all ...”

“... for them. Recordings were designed to be accessible, but also to last. ‘From the Supremes,’ James Gavin writes, ‘Michael got his first taste of the catchy hooks and beats that made a pop song unforgettable.’ Or as Michael put it, ‘I knew how to make these records and make them jump out the radio.’In 1975, when Michael was twelve, his family ...”

“... first he wanted to be rich. Warhol’s attitude to money was a cross between Jay Gatsby’s and Holly Golightly’s – he yearned for the world where money allowed you to be whoever you wanted to be, where money was confidence and confidence was character, and where each day was a promise of diamonds as big as the Ritz. Carmel Snow, who edited Harper’s ...”

“... I started writing it, in my head, the very second I saw the video footage of the Liverpool toddler James Bulger being led away by the two ten-year-olds who would become his murderers. There was something familiar about the boys – their jackets, their haircuts, their way of inclining their heads to one another, their furtiveness, their ...”

“... in government. A chunk of Harris’s old Glasgow constituency is now represented in Edinburgh by Holly Bruce of the Scottish Green Party, which beat Labour into third place in both of Scotland’s main cities. ‘By the early 21st century,’ David Torrance writes in A History of the Scottish Labour Party, the party ‘appeared to have lost an empire but ...”

“... irresponsible for publishing today’s Liz Jones piece. This should be a resignation matter,’ James Ball of the Guardian tweeted. Jonathan Haynes, also of the Guardian, described it as a ‘JAW-DROPPINGLY irresponsible and stupid paragraph on suicide from Liz Jones. Cannot believe MoS have published it.’ Did she really not care how many vulnerable ...”

“... in their exotic spear-waving poses. It was some relief to see the paperback of James Fox’s excellent White Mischief with its measured exposure of the shallow callous daftness of settler society circa 1940, popping cheekily up among them. Nairobi is still Africa’s safari capital, where the lucky tourist is offered all kinds of trips to ...”

“... Faustian in our dealing, though the uneven friendship in The Third Man between the dim writer Holly Martins and his demonic school-friend Harry Lime has subsequently struck me as echoing our own relationship. Any competent biographer ends up knowing his subject’s life far better than do any of the individual witnesses on whose testimony he has ...”

“... Proust, Trollope, Dickens, Shakespeare and certain Latin poets (Martial, Horace). Of the King James version of the Bible, he said: ‘It’s frightfully good.’ Early on he praised the work of Derek Walcott, who had once been a friend of his, and recited a whole poem, ‘As John to Patmos’, from memory. But later he rubbished him, and Walcott replied ...”

“... entries from this trip (published in 1977 in Souvenirs and Prophecies, edited by his daughter Holly) suggest that Stevens rapidly metamorphosed into an adept backwoodsman, merrily shooting deer and living off the land like a latter-day Natty Bumppo.* It’s hard to square our usual image of Stevens as a doggedly conscientious master of surety and fidelity ...”

“... who want to farm. Some see their patrimony disintegrate before they have a chance to inherit it. James Lake did. His grandfather started a mushroom-growing business in Hertfordshire and moved it to Little Fransham in Norfolk, a few miles south of the Agnew and Townshend farms and the old airfield, in the 1960s. By the time Lake was born in the 1970s the ...”

“... tropics, the search for a different earthly orientation or accommodation)? Maybe Browning or Henry James – the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens?Most readers of the poems will have a pretty accurate sense of the life, though not one derived from the ...”