“... reader cares enough to decide which is which. He clogs scenes with lectures; an account of a drag ball, for instance, is drowned out by paragraphs of miscellaneous erudition: ‘So priests down through the ages, skirted in respectful imitation of androgynous deities who reigned before Baal was worshipped as a pillar, before Osiris sported erection, before men ...”

“... fruit, flying kites made of old newspapers, fishing in the river with my father, playing ball’. Provincial children of a similar social class in oil-importing countries which were even poorer, such as Colombia next door, or in Central America or the Caribbean, had considerably less favourable life chances. Even so, Chávez only occasionally ...”

“... tongs of his own, in place of Monsieur le Blanc himself, to dress a lady’s hair in time for a ball. ‘All his friends had ten thousand a year; he talked of his horses and his carriages, his estate and his interest; and when he addressed you as a lady, you could not help drawing back for fear he should give you a kiss.’ Miss Townshend, she writes, was ...”

“... is written in that free-associative style Empson used in his first published poem, ‘Poem about a ball in the 19th century’, and in another here printed, called ‘Address to a Tennis Player’; the notes to the poems express some doubt about the virtues of this manner, and they seem justified, but he kept the first poem in the Collected and perhaps ...”

“... of a poem to perk him up. It pays tribute to the American baseball star Ted Williams: ‘Watch the ball and do your thing/This is the moment. Here’s your chance/Don’t let anyone mess with your swing.’ He responds gratefully: ‘Brilliant poem. We need a British version of it.’ Brown hopes this picture is enough to give a sense of the unique challenge ...”

“... of Blake’s visionary portraits – part fraudulent, part inspired. Shadows in a crystal ball. The London Ackroyd, interlocutor for Dickens and Dan Leno, had shifted his critical position from Modernism to heritage curation, clarifying with clear lines all that had previously been ambiguous. Pound, with whom Ackroyd began, was no longer a fashionable ...”

“... time when the study of ancient Ireland was becoming politically resonant. He became friendly with George Petrie, who had done much to revitalise the antiquities committee of the Royal Irish Academy, and was responsible for its acquisition of important Irish manuscripts. Wilde worked with Petrie in County Meath, north of Dublin, discovering the remnants of ...”

“... bombs went off all over the country in a spree that saw 120 dead. It was two years exactly since George W. Bush had announced that ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq were over, an anniversary marked that week with 17 co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad. May 2nd is the date of Joseph McCarthy’s death and J. Edgar Hoover’s. It is the date of Tony Blair’s ...”

“... take on this touchy matter is provided by Sinatra’s long-time (African-American) valet, George Jacobs. In his immensely entertaining memoir Mr S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra (2003), he defends Sinatra and the other Rat Pack roustabouts, and says the only people he ever got a real nasty sizzle of racism from were a few Mafia bosses, and the ...”

“... were pro-life. Prominent Republicans, including (for much of their careers) Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, were often pro-choice on principle – they were, after all, meant to be the defenders of individual liberty. Many states would probably have eventually liberalised abortion laws on their own. In 1970, abortion was legal in two, Oregon and ...”

“... Luther King Sr allowed the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, dressed as house slaves, to sing for a ball celebrating the 1939 première of Gone with the Wind. His ten-year-old son was dressed as a pickaninny. King was criticised by his fellow Baptist ministers, but not for seeming to endorse the Lost Cause: they said he shouldn’t have performed for a ...”

“... scratch round-up of whoever’s available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing too as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely ...”

“... landing or shooting or climbing The Big One: Mailer as Babe Ruth wanting to ‘hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters’ or Hemingway, who ‘wouldn’t fight Dr Tolstoi in a 20-round bout because I know he would knock my cars off’. Obviously, what Hawthorne had dismissed as a band of ‘scribbling ...”

“... sometime in the early 1980s at Drury Lane in an Amnesty concert, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, and a sketch I did with John Fortune. Two upper-class figures are comparing notes about sex, one of them picking up lorry drivers (or what he fondly imagines to be lorry drivers) in the lavatories of Notting Hill, the other claiming to have exuberant sex ...”

“... where a mobster beats his pregnant girlfriend to death. Chase took it as a compliment. When Alan Ball was co-writing Grace under Fire for ABC, ‘people’s assistants were coming up and giving me notes, like “I don’t like the colour of the wall on that set.”’ When he moved to HBO to make Six Feet Under, the feedback on his pilot script was: ‘Could ...”