“... Burnt Diaries (1999), and by Elaine Feinstein in her biography of Hughes from 2001. Like his hero Robert Graves, Hughes tirelessly pursued the White Goddess, or the Goddess of Complete Being as he called her in his study of Shakespeare, both in his imagination and in the forms that she assumed in the women whom he met and slept with. Few, it seems, took much ...”

“... face portrait of Miss Jogg the model, and a suit of armour containing Don Quixote.’ Or, ‘One stone terrace (cracked), one gondola in distance, one Venetian senator’s dress complete, richly embroidered white satin costume with profile portrait of Miss Jogg the model, one Scimitar superbly mounted in gold with jewelled handle, elaborate Moorish dress ...”

“... freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with the ...”

“... were not unknown. Haggerston Baths, with its soft red brick laid in English bonds, its Portland stone dressing, was a marker for the territory, from the 90-foot chimney stack for coal-fired boilers to the golden galleon that caught the wind as a weathervane. This craft was a symbol of locality by which those staggering home from a cluster of pubs could ...”

“... Depestre; the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam; the French poet Louis Aragon; the French photographer Robert Doisneau; the Russian-Mexican painter Vlady Rusakov and his father, Victor Serge, hero of the anti-Stalinist left. Several of her works are lost, including The Commune, Louise Michel and Us, a film she worked on in the early 1970s and ‘Guns for ...”

“... In the famous phrase about the death of Little Nell, it would require a man with a heart of stone to read these ricordi di amore without bursting into helpless laughter. So let us forget the tear-stained love interest and turn to politics, for the ultimate test of a politician’s reminiscences is whether they assist us in understanding the events which ...”

“... and the human touch which made him such a fine teacher. The long list of his pupils runs from Robert Kee at Magdalen in the Thirties to Kathy Burk, the last of his postgraduate students, in the Seventies. But a survey of the many historians he taught would show that in various respects they did not agree with Alan Taylor or indeed with one another. One of ...”

“... Captain acted with such civility that he became Darwin’s ‘beau ideal’ before they left port. Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon and ipso facto naturalist, was so put out by the social preference and hindrance to his own efforts to collect that he quit in Rio and shipped home. (The tradesman-status of naval surgeons in the 1830s was notorious.) It was ...”

“... Jamie and knocked her little girl about, Bill moves on to Chicago. (Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is a leitmotif in the narrative.) Reduced to selling her blood, Jamie takes the money her long-suffering sister has wired her and instead of going where she should, to Hershey, never arrived at in this novel, she follows Bill to Chicago. At that city’s ...”

“... it was sanctioned by Kennedy himself in mendacious leaks to favoured journalists and then set in stone in his younger brother’s dramatic narrative, Thirteen Days. Bobby Kennedy’s posthumously published account, which made much of his own role as a voice of reason, was buttressed by hagiographers of the Kennedy court, notably Arthur Schlesinger, the ...”

“... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...”

“... health’ products and vitamins. The anti-vax doctor Mark Geier, quoted extensively by Robert F. Kennedy Jr in his infamous Rolling Stone article, marketed bogus autism treatments, including chelation therapy, which draws metals from the bloodstream (Geier was stripped of his medical licence in 2011). Another ...”

“... impressed. It was a building that worked, though made of ordinary and traditional materials – stone, timber and iron – on a limited budget; it was the product of a mind at once practical and imaginative. Throughout, as my then boss, Andy MacMillan, put it, Mackintosh ‘demonstrates a creative exploitation of each and every specific requirement, seizing ...”

“... a small courtyard. A doorway at the far corner leads into a building of indeterminate age with a stone façade. You pass along a brief, twisting entranceway and into an elegant antechamber. But then the passage suddenly and dramatically opens out, leading into a vast, formal hall. It is richly decorated with 17th-century panelling and arrayed flags, all ...”

“... Abu Simbel, the stones aligned to mark the moonrise and moonset at Stonehenge, the 5000-year-old stone circle at Callanish on the Isle of Lewis: they all appear to describe the extent of our capacity for wonder, the full midsummer Moon at the Callanish stones in certain years appearing ‘to skim the horizon in a ghostly and prophetic way’. Stroud is a ...”