“... and other large caged animals would be dangerous to leave at large once the balloon went up,’ he began to take preventative measures with an anti-tank rifle (they may have been the only shots Watt fired ‘in action’). The troops under his command objected to such summary treatment being meted out to the zoo’s two zebras; they were released and ...”

“... because the point of Connolly turned out to be Connolly not producing the masterpieces which he touchingly felt to lurk just a few months’ hard work away. He was not, like Byron or Stendhal, both a poet or a novelist and a legend. At the same time he was obsessed with the ...”

“... moustachioed 16th-century Brahmin. Not for the first time, Richet refused to admit that what he had witnessed was a trick, and the medium, once she had changed her name, continued to practise. The support of scientists such as Richet and, earlier, the pioneering physicist and Fellow of the Royal Society William Crookes, who in the 1870s had speculated ...”

“... From the opening frame, we’ve been forced to share the point of view of Mark’s camera, which he has turned into a killing machine, stabbing young women with a blade hidden in the tripod and recording their expressions at the moment of death. Mark himself was used by his camera-obsessed father, who particularly enjoyed capturing ‘the reactions of the ...”

“... give a writer a key to your apartment. Or your office. Never let him talk to your children. If he says he wants to take a bath tell him the plumbing’s knackered. If he makes for the fridge say everybody just died of food poisoning. Don’t encourage him in any way. Never give him ...”

“... Milbourne Marsh, a carpenter from an English family whose fortunes were connected to the sea. When he landed in Port Royal in 1732, the settlement had been rebuilt on more modest lines, with a small dockyard, but the big trade – especially in slaves – had gone to Kingston. All the same, if a young man could survive the three-month passage and live through ...”

“... said she was ‘baffled’ by her own behaviour – she had a much nicer TV set at home. Shonola Smith, 22, pleaded guilty, along with her sister and a friend, to ‘entering’ Argos in Croydon: ‘The tragedy is that you are all of previous good character,’ the judge said, as he sentenced them to six months ...”

“... Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that school segregation was a danger to public health.Unfortunately for Wertham’s reputation, his work with children also left him with a bee in his bonnet about comic books. His younger patients, ...”

“... value’ and be in modern idiom rather than a pastiche of Elizabethan poetry. ‘At any rate,’ he gentled Empson, ‘I hope you will turn the matter over in your mind.’As Roma Gill has reported in the Times Literary Supplement (31 July), Empson advised the Vice-Chancellor that Elizabethan masquers would have told the Queen ‘that she was God, and that ...”

“... torqued by a tinnital static of prescription ups and downs, Elvis Presley finally broke down. He poured out his troubles to Larry Geller, celebrity hair stylist and, lately, something of a spirit guide for Elvis. Geller had given him a mind-expanding reading list of what we would now recognise as New Age self-help books. Elvis had read them all, performed ...”

“... with his parents in Worksop, as if what had happened in America was a violent dream from which he’d woken to reality in his old back bedroom at 27 Coleridge Road. For several days, it seemed that he was going to get away with it. The police then had no weapon and no motive. People who knew the Entwistles remembered ...”

“... I was introduced at the desk, in the way that one is, to an American writer who told me that he’d heard about my novels, even picked up copies, but couldn’t actually commit himself to the act of reading them until he’d checked out the explanatory essays, the biographical anecdotes (which do not exist). Until that ...”

“... of another critic, who had just returned to London from the Berlin Film Festival. Over dinner he took pleasure in regaling us with stories of the male to female transsexual prostitutes he had met on the city’s streets, and how difficult it was to ‘complete’ the transaction since the transsexual body interprets the ...”