“... could cram from head office cuttings files on the flight out. A British angle is the line editors love the most. Yet strangely no one mentioned the UK’s active encouragement of the massacres of between half a million and a million people which brought Suharto to power in the Sixties. Reporters did not need to go to the Public Record Office to find evidence ...”

“... sense of mischief; a romantic temperament which enabled him to enjoy a number of undemanding love affairs; a fellowship of All Souls and, at the age of only 45, the Wardenship. Perhaps this last was the trouble, ‘OUR THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU DURING THIS TRYING TIME. JOHN AND PENELOPE’ read his telegram from the Betjemans when he was elected. Or perhaps ...”

“... since it provides the only tenuous link among these people. The most officious of the strangers, Harold Chapman (a Docklands property-dealer in his other life) is approached for money with vague menaces by a local peasant family who own a crumbling wall that’s threatening to block the way, and he in turn approaches his various neighbours. So it’s a plot ...”

“... was concerned, when Harald harðræði, the giant King of Norway, was killed by his namesake Harold Godwinsson at Stamford Bridge, on 25 September 1066, just 19 days before the Battle of Hastings. In between Lindisfarne and Stamford Bridge, somewhere round the year 870, Iceland was discovered and settled by Scandinavians – according a later account by ...”

“... of Mr Natural; Home Grown Funnies (in which the uptight White Man is kidnapped by and falls in love with a female Bigfoot); the even more absurdly kinky Big Ass Comics; Your Hytone Comix, which features an anthropomorphic toilet; and the classic XYZ Comics (including, among other things, ‘The Many Faces of R. Crumb’ and an eight-page exercise called ...”

“... was of great interest to me. I am not a linguist, I am not a scholar by nature or inclination; I love reading and writing and practising psychoanalysis but I have never done anything that looks like what people call research. I have also always admired the Strachey translation, and like many people really did think of it as the standard edition. Like the ...”

“... and ‘California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long skirt’. He fell in love with Samori’s mother, a young woman from Chicago, and befriended a handsome doctor’s son called Prince Jones, whose untimely death at the hands of the police functions as the moral fulcrum of the book. Coates then writes of his early years of struggle as ...”

“... never strident. What she does seem, on this evidence, is a bit unreal. Continually and chastely in love with the one man while he and all around her are successively consumed by more or less ephemeral passions, she is starring in a play by Shaw while everybody else is in a play by Schnitzler. The libidinous cyclone of which she has perennially functioned as ...”

“... for another woman, during a difficult pregnancy in which mother and child seemed doomed; her love affair with the feminist Bryher was fraught; writing set up its own strains: but Freud already knew, amid this welter of anxieties, what really worried the patient. Had he not just shown, in the lecture on ‘Femininity’ (1933), that women are driven by a ...”

“... alter egos, Susie and Antonia, and the letters reveal the existence of a protracted infatuation or love affair with a young man called Charles Thurstan Edward-Collins (the possessor of the ‘grey feminine eyes’). Louis returned to Marlborough to visit after he left for Oxford. (‘I told Charles I wasn’t coming to M.C. any more but I expect I shall. The ...”

“... to hounds by tube, dressed in full hunting pink, amid somewhat bemused workmen. Though he shared a love of poetry with Powell, Macleod was appalled at the idea of early rising, let alone hunting – his life was one of late nights, pretty women, and heavy smoking and drinking over the card table. Later on, boring government meetings would be spent writing ...”

“... postwar childhood, and the 1960s bring out the scold in him. Cabinet ministers were disgraced for love, thugs robbed a mail-train and were hailed as heroes, unmasked traitors were admired for their complex personalities, the harlot’s cry from mews to mews had the exultant confidence of Callas singing ‘Casta diva’ and the Beatles mouthed and mimed to ...”

“... in the Army have become so devoted to their President. Walt Whitman, with his idea of ‘adhesive love’, might have offered an explanation: that bearded nurse makes a brief appearance in the novel, and we half-expect him to eulogise the President, but that would be too embarrassing. Lincoln’s grandeur and awesomeness must, for Vidal, be presented more ...”

“... Frank Ocean, who astonished the luridly heterosexual R’n’B scene last year by recording love songs addressed to his boyfriend. But what if she’d just prefer to be one of the characters in Made in Chelsea? Heti, who turned 36 on Christmas Day, has said that one of the starting points of the novel (others were Warhol and Werner Herzog and ...”

“... silent.’ ‘The fear of people’ had been ‘instilled’ in her, as had a desperate need for love. She was impulsively generous, sympathetic to any suffering in people or animals, but desperately over-sensitive to criticism or rebuff. She changed her mind and her feelings about people violently and often and at such moments she was not silent, often in ...”