“... Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t ...”

“... the heroine, Joan Ogden, who has grown miserably old in a small provincial town, overhears two young women discussing her. She recognises them as women of the same ‘type’ as her: unattached, independent, sexually ambiguous. They dress like her, and wear their hair cut in a similar style. But they seem to inhabit a different world: their lamps have very ...”

“... Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales though, and most of the ...”

“... or settle for palliative care which at its best is a comfortable death without pain. What Francis Bacon called ‘a fair and easy passage’, which I used as the title of a TV play written and broadcast long ago. An announcement of forthcoming but more or less certain death by a public figure opens our eyes to death, the one that is coming to us ...”

“... characters, but what they represent is the reason for attending to what they say. For example, a young woman casts her vote for Attlee: what she says about this (she would of course have voted for Churchill if there had been a war to fight) gives information about the young post-war electorate. The ironies and brutalities ...”

“... and finally political history – as well as the longest entry in Britain’s Who’s Who. Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas, Prince of Battenberg, was born on 25 June 1900, the second son of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria. His father, grandson of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt and son of Prince Alexander of Battenberg, had joined ...”

“... late in the 1950s, a publisher asked me to read the typescript of a fiercely revisionist book by a young military historian who had gathered up the views of the generals Monty had sacked in the Western Desert. The publisher hardly needed to be told by me that the book would create a scandal. I now learn from Nigel Hamilton’s pages that Monty also was shown a ...”

“... from the heart’ as Lovelace imagines it; not quite an unmediated revelation of the young poet’s character; not quite the easy and energetic style that Sidney would soon develop in the Arcadia and The Defence of Poesy. Failing to receive a prompt reply, Languet wonders if the fault lies with some lack of writerly elegance on his own ...”

“... Dark, Dantean​ , witty’, Alfred Hayes saw himself as personifying ‘a new sort of “young generation”, the lyric poet of the New York working class, of the strike front, the writer of sketches that bite into the memory’. Born in London in 1911 to a Jewish family that emigrated to the US when he was three, Hayes left school in 1929, the year of the Crash ...”

“... they had been due a day later. But Elizabeth, without ever admitting it to Herman or to Francis, had kept his original letter. Forging a letter because Herman ‘liked always to be in the right’ is the kind of morally reprehensible incident of which Henry James would have made much; he would also have made something out of Elizabeth’s being so ...”

“... he warned, ‘is not the same as the truth of history.’ Infatuated with Hegel, like many of his young peers in Russia, Herzen later became bluntly dismissive of rational schema in politics. History, he wrote, contains ‘a great deal that is fortuitous, stupid, unsuccessful and confused. Reason, fully developed thought, comes last.’ He anticipated ...”

“... to be past child-bearing age. Focus of Isabel’s attention, however, is the Splendid Young Man (a further Dickensian chime) whose blond curls and red socks send tremors of passion through his seminar students. Her fond hopes of being swept off her feet are scuppered when her flatmate Pol, a large and louche woman, sweeps the Splendid ...”

“... the publishers in America’, Wolfe scanned ‘the billion-footed city for the approach of the young novelists who, surely, would bring [us] the big novels of the racial clashes, the hippy movement, the New Left, the Wall Street boom, the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam. But such creatures, it seemed, no longer existed.’ But this was to ignore, or ...”

“... still the need for some external confirmation: ‘the question of a disability – Coleridge and Francis Thompson and Edgar Allan Poe had their addiction to opium, Pope his lameness, Cowper his depression, John Clare his insanity.’ Family disasters fed the desire for dark afflictions: her brother’s epilepsy, the death by drowning of a sister, like ...”

“... the Vietnam War has been reduced to a Generation X rock band named Diem. Recently, I overheard a young, pepper-bellied Mexican saloon-owner by the name of Dagoberto telling a Vietnam veteran in his overpriced Aspen bar: ‘You old farts, still mucking around in that war. Hell, you guys lost the son of a bitch, and that’s the real story, fucking old ...”