“... situation when the most repeated fact about someone’s life is that a famous person was best man at their wedding. Dylan Thomas did the honours for Lynette Roberts and her groom in 1939, wearing a ‘smart brown suit’ he borrowed for the occasion. ‘I carried wild flowers and gave Dylan a bunchful of wild flowers for his lapel,’ Roberts ...”

“... childhood love. Alliteration surfaces from time to time, and his sixth poem, ‘Mony Ryal Ray’ quotes a line from the Middle English Perle; the poem’s epigraph, ‘For urthely herte myght not suffyse’, is from the same source – MacSweeney has often used a pastiche-medieval register for particular effects, in ‘Wolf Tongue’ (1978), for ...”

“... and fibre art were displayed on which Sedgwick had scanned computer images of her body, an X-ray and CAT-scan images of her spine. Interviewed by Stephen Barber and David Clark, the editors of Regarding Sedgwick, she said that she was finding it hard to ‘take pleasure in writing’, and was much more drawn to the visual than the verbal, to texture ...”

“... Maxwell companies and pensioners by a string of accountants, including the receivers for the fat man’s bust businesses, Arthur Andersen. Most of these cases were ‘settled’ in deals whose terms became increasingly inaccessible as the accountancy firms swallowed each other up. Price Waterhouse swallowed Coopers and Lybrand, Touche Ross became Deloitte ...”

“... too rancid for inclusion, why did the compiler exclude ‘The Background’, a gem of purest ray serene, as free of malice as it is of ambiguous wolf-boys? Here we have Henri Deplis using a windfall to commission a famous Italian tattooist to portray the Fall of Icarus across his back. The result is a slight disappointment as the client had ‘supposed ...”

“... More precisely, The Mirror, which explores the historical and personal memories of a dying man, awoke and answered an old concern, born when Harrison saw the newsreel footage of bodies being bulldozed into pits at Belsen. ‘I have never forgotten that introduction to the filming of real life or, in this case, real and terrifying death. Nor how jarring ...”

“... first broadcast in 1951; five years later, Hancock’s Half Hour introduced two brilliant writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who between them created a character whose sense of social and intellectual confinement puts The Lavender Hill Mob’s bullion robbers in the shade and eventually – after Hancock had morphed into Harold Steptoe – blossomed into ...”

“... about two sisters, as different as any two humans could possibly be, who fall into the orbit of a man whose sexual power may be likened to gravity. Williams wanted a great director for his play but weeks passed with no word from Kazan, who was called Gadget or Gadge by everybody in the theatre world. When Williams called Kazan at home, Molly, Kazan’s ...”

“... Oliver Craske​ begins his biography of Ravi Shankar by telling an Indian parable. A blind man, stroking an elephant’s trunk, thinks he is holding a snake. Another blind man, running his hands along the animal’s leg, assumes he is touching a tree trunk; a third mistakes its tail for a rope ...”

“... no percentage in Bill’s advisers bullet-pointing paperbacks composed by a peripatetic, a white man who wrote in black-face. Griffin does not aspire to Easy’s confidential charm, his bright-eyed savvy, his innocence. He’s a white man’s black, darker in spirit, thwarted and confused. And New Orleans, the setting for ...”

“... no other pedestrians to be seen and no cars on the roadway. Jacobson bid farewell to this Nick Ray set in the mid-Fifties. Unlike so many of the tens of thousands of South Africans who would soon be exiled, and whose lives abroad would always seem to them provisional, he was able to settle pretty thoroughly in London. From here, in due course, he could ...”

“... possible basis of regress instead of progress in evolution. Thus when Darwin wrote The Descent of Man in 1871, he now cautioned his readers that ‘progress is no invariable rule’. Edwin Ray Lankester, one of Darwin’s younger followers, soon called attention to the existence of parasites as apparent examples of ...”

“... inescapably on the importance of the digital sampler, invented early in the decade. Beadle is a man with strong opinions. At one point he describes Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as ‘possibly the most over-rated album of all time’. His attitude to changes brought about by new music technology is generally positive. Samplers are the most ...”

“... working life in a relatively open-minded Egypt. Alhazen was a proto-Popperian. ‘The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists,’ he wrote, ‘if learning the truth be his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side.’ Suspect your faith ...”

“... urge and reposition the four types of stone that compose the spit. Now it resembles the tail of a ray or skate, now it’s a sea-tangle head, now it’s a hand whose forefinger points westward. Sometimes it settles down as the head of a bear with an eye and snout that look east in July, west in the second August. If the images were printed on successive pages ...”