“... All those faces last seen making up the numbers in souvenir snapshots from the Kentucky Club: Eric Mason, Frankie Fraser, Terry Spinks (a cortisone cherub). Ruthlessly ironed handkerchiefs peeping from the gash of a breast pocket. This turnout has been a killing for the car rental mobs, the muscle agencies, the barbers. Who says London refuses to oblige major ...”

“... as I write (do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?). ‘Whatever they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in literature, film and other ...”

“... of mere whingers against Theory, all those mouthy conservatives from (say) Helen Gardner . . . to Roger Shattuck . . . with their romps up and down the glooming critical slopes of the Blooms, Allan and Harold’ – this is a fair sample, unfortunately, of his idea of lively prose. He accepts that post-structuralism, new historicism, queer studies and all the ...”

“... for ‘cheating a Derbyshire gentleman with counters instead of silver’, and a burglar, Thomas Mason (‘alias Humming Tom’), who had broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her ...”

“... The line this time was drawn between the north and south of his own spasmodic body, a prophylactic Mason-Dixon line somewhere around the belt loops. The old saw about Elvis ‘ripping off’ black music is a bit of a non-starter. If he forged anything new from old stock, it was the hard-bopping country music that was used as a baseline. Presley’s early ...”

“... posing as a die-hard fan (in some versions of the story she leaped out of a giant birthday cake). Roger Edens, an MGM composer who was Garland’s music coach, and perhaps the most important artistic influence on her career, had written a new arrangement of the song (which was twenty years old). ‘Dear Mr Gable,’ Garland sings,I am writing this to youAnd I ...”