“... him with the Southern bloc in the Senate, which had been blocking civil rights legislation for more than fifty years. Johnson had always supported his fellow Southern senators in refusing to back anti-lynching legislation, claiming it was a matter for the individual states. This was the price he paid for getting them to do his bidding when he needed ...”

“... cantankerous the world of literature is, and how smarmy, both backbiting and back-scratching much more so than the theatre or show business generally. I’m sure this is because actors don’t moonlight as critics in the way novelists or writers do. Few writers are reviewers tout court, most having other jobs as novelists, historians, biographers or ...”

“... MacArthur; almost all of us, it seems, would rather forget him. Except writers. There have been more than a dozen biographies of MacArthur. Part of the fascination is his contradictoriness: could the same MacArthur really have been a military genius, a colossal blunderer, a proto-Fascist and a world-class charlatan? Another attraction is the record-setting ...”

“... were bussed straight to the consulate, where they were offered sandwiches, tea, cigarettes and more forms to fill in. My uncle Peter thinks they were then put up for a couple of weeks in the Pera Palace Hotel, established in 1895 by the Wagons-Lits Company as the unofficial terminus for the Orient Express. Then they moved into a flat somewhere nearby. It ...”

“... the trilby in his hands. ‘Anyway,’ says Mr Parr kindly but with what the three of us know is more tact than truth, ‘depression isn’t really mental illness. I see it all the time.’ Mr Parr sees it all the time because he is the Mental Health Welfare Officer for the Craven district and late this September evening in 1966 Dad and I are sitting in his ...”

“... also one of failure. It is hard to decide what part of him came first. Was the colour of his skin more important than his sexuality? Was his religious upbringing more important than his reading of the American masters? Were his sadness and anger more important than his love of ...”

“... riverpath from mouth to source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the ...”

“... great American film directors have suffered from a common predicament. Democratic fealty and, more important, financial constraint meant they were bound to respect popular taste. That requirement need not have been oppressive – silent movies, after all, were descendants of the popular fiction of Balzac and Dickens. What dampened the spirits of all but ...”

“... rumoured to be on offer from somewhere between £30 million and £50 million a shot? One of the more outrageous selling points is a promised ‘clear day’ vision of the North Sea fishing fleet 44 miles downriver from this pyramid lighthouse. In promotional photographs some of the private baths on the upper decks look competition-sized. Wet rooms are like ...”

“... elected to Parliament as the member for Chingford, a distance of about three miles. Ponders End is more of a transport collision than a settlement and nobody needs much political arm-twisting to move on. Probably the best account of the place is found in a Gerald Kersh novel, Fowler’s End (1957). A character, setting out to locate this uncelebrated railway ...”

“... called them. If he failed to understand her, Hughes understood the poems. He was – perhaps even more primarily than being her earthly husband – their reader. And he writes finely of how she did it, with the clear eye that knows. She was always having a big coffee idea of what to name a collection or one of her characters and it was always terrible; this ...”

“... a contradictory existence, though I never had any doubts which side I was on. The other side was more fun; they laughed and they joked, but one learned a great deal from trade-union and railway workers’ leaders, who treated me as an adult from quite a young age. I’d say, ‘What’s going on?’ and they’d explain: ‘This is what’s going on ...”

“... in 1968, at the age of eight. In several of the cases, officers kept their fake identities for more than ten years and exploited them in sexual situations. To strengthen their ‘backstory’, they would visit the places of their ‘childhood’, walking around the houses they had lived in before they died, all the better to implant the legend of their ...”

“... Tippett was enthusing about English Renaissance music – Henry Purcell, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tallis – twenty years before the Early Music revival of the 1950s. He came to revere Beethoven and Stravinsky, adored the visionary American composer Charles Ives, and distrusted the postcard folksiness of British composers like Finzi and Delius. When it ...”

“... Walser? (Ooooh errrg blush, ahem, little cough, um: No, I’m ashamed to say . . .) Had I read Thomas Bernhard? (Yes! – Yes, I have! ‘Wittgenstein’s Nephew’! Yay! Yippee! Wow! Phew! – dodged the bullet that time!) It seemed, for a while at least, that I had yet to be contaminated by the shocking intellectual mediocrity surrounding me at Stanford ...”