“... of Ellington, Joni, film music, chanson. It’s a perfectly realised whole. The opening rush of ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’ is breathtaking: strings, trumpets, steel drums, a whole bestiary of strange vibrations swirling around in a quantum funk. A track like ‘I Wonder U’ is only 1'40" long, but seems to suggest whole new sonic horizons. Looking ...”

“... black mamba’. Nabokov responded by putting Hingley into the translation (heavily revised) of King, Queen, Knave as a department store mannequin – a literal blockhead. The odd thing is that, in addition to a critical study, Hingley was reviewing Speak, Memory, book which, like Pnin, displays Nabokov’s humanity at its most engaging. His private manner ...”

“... TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from ...”

“... to be taken seriously (while not forgetting that Shakespeare is also characterised by Henry IV and King John and Timon and Cymbeline). If Dryden died three hundred years ago, then a tercentenary feels like the right moment to ask what his Hamlet is, or what it is that we now recommend him for. The interest of the question is increased, though also ...”

“... short distance from the centre-left to the reactionary right. In 2009, he hailed the neocon writer Christopher Caldwell, who had claimed that Muslims are ‘conquering Europe’s cities, street by street’, as a brilliant seer, who understood the consequences of undermining ‘national tradition’ with ‘liberal universalism’. It may be unfair to pick on ...”

“... even to universities – that by the early 1970s, as the historian of management consulting Christopher McKenna has argued, the major firms had ‘quite literally decentralised most of the large companies in Europe’. To keep their profits flowing in, management consultants turned to big state institutions, reorganising government ...”

“... writing, and eventually managed to move Margaret and his children to the city, in 1830, to 7 Great King Street. But he was never really out of trouble, ending up more than once in the Canongate Tollbooth, for debt. The pattern of death and loss among children which had shaped his early years came back to repeat itself, with the death of his son William, in ...”

“... dead master’s work. Shortly after collaborating on Timon of Athens, Middleton had presented the King’s Men with a double-edged homage to Shakespeare, The Revenger’s Tragedy, whose protagonist is a frenetic caricature of Shakespeare’s hesitant revenger; and near the end of his career, in The Changeling, he would subject Othello to an equally bizarre ...”

“... rain. Spend any time reviewing such images and you come to an unexpected conclusion: our supposed King of Cool is, if anything, notably un-‘iconic’. In a bandstand snap from 1948 it’s bassist Tommy Potter and a razor-cheeked young Miles who look like the hippest cadavers in town. In another band snap, from 1952, the likes of Oscar Peterson and Ben ...”

“... Adventures of Augie March (his breakthrough virtuoso solo), Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow had hit the jackpot. The much coveted Bitch-Goddess of Success was now his sugar mama. ‘Guys, I’m rich,’ he declared, and told the poet Stanley Burnshaw that if the din from Herzog grew too loud, ‘I can always stuff my ears with ...”

“... The first of these pay-outs were made on 11 April 1992, with the former Defence Secretary Tom King, the finally jettisoned Kenneth Baker, and the former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Brooke each receiving £8049 of public money to assuage their sense of political failure. Lord Waddington stood down as Leader of the House of Lords at the same time, for ...”

“... Revolution. Defoe boasted of wearing a mourning ring that had been given at the funeral of Christopher Love, a Presbyterian minister beheaded in 1653 for his part in a plot to overthrow Cromwell. Defoe mentions Love in his 1704 pamphlet The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge – it is reprinted in W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank’s excellent ...”

“... rest of it is a film set, cranking out heritage for export: crinoline frolics and The Madness of King George. I’d barely set foot outside my first secondhand bookshop when I was pounced on by a two-person television crew doing a vox pop on the Dome. There was a man hefting a DVC camera and a woman with a clipboard. After a morning trying to tease a story ...”

“... Lord of the Rings experience are about to be replaced with fast-food tie-ins (a deal with Burger King has been announced), a hit pop record, trading cards, furry backpacks. It is a strange reversal. Except that in a way it is not.Take a look at the Fellowship trailers, different versions of which can be downloaded from www.lordoftherings.net. The landscapes ...”

“... the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such as Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza (wearing a ‘100+ carat diamond’), Al Taubman and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. De Pury was private curator to Baron ‘Heini’ – Hans Heinrich ...”