“... almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as ‘an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him’. He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles, but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious ‘Committee’ somewhere abroad, he has set up a ...”

“... have said, “Sister, be grateful that they were not forking.’ ” So, no problem with the man. Then when Lolita was scaling the bestseller list and before Nabokov became wary of the spontaneous interview, a reporter from Sports Illustrated accompanied the Nabokovs on a butterfly-hunting trip. Nabokov kept up a running commentary. When the car ...”

“... were always defined against omnipresent threats: mutinous natives, rebellious slaves. The white man, Tocqueville wrote as he observed race relations in America, ‘is to the men of other races what man himself is to the animals’, in the sense that he ‘makes them serve his purposes, and when he cannot make them ...”

“... a poltergeist that plagued the lives of the Irving family in a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Man.* Gef hurled objects, killed rabbits, spat at the family and stole from them, but he also spoke several languages. ‘I am the Fifth Dimension!’ he apparently shouted. ‘I am the Eighth Wonder of the World!’Ghost hunting was a money-spinner between the ...”

“... in the way of his subsequent career as a novelist, screenwriter and TV host, or his cameo in Iron Man 2.Recently, however, a wave of newly retired special operators from the War on Terror years have specialised in a different genre: the business self-help manual. These former military officers feel that a career spent planning deadly missions and leading men ...”

“... by others for bringing home the full horror of the war (the Dean of Durham and the zoologist Ray Lankester thought it a disgrace), and it was the one scene in the film that was not authentic and had been faked up behind the lines. Hynes brings the same flair to advertisements. He reproduces a deliciously modish Bond Street tailor’s advertisement ...”

“... wholeheartedness of their responses to life around him and to his correspondents. In them we see a man at one with himself and with the granite, the fast rivers, the mighty resinous trees of the western Sierra Nevada. In a letter of 1871 to the friend who elicited much of his most heartfelt incidental writing, Jeanne Carr, wife of the professor of agriculture ...”

“... is packed with revelatory, disturbing illustrations; Archer-Straw has little time either for Man Ray’s 1926 photographic series Noire et blanche (Kiki of Montparnasse’s head alongside an African mask) or for the much attacked 1984 Museum of Modern Art Primitivism exhibition, which juxtaposed modern painting and sculpture with African prototypes ...”

“... that Berryman began to write his Dream Songs with a song he later ‘killed’: The jolly old man is a silly old dumb with a mean face, humped, who kills dead. There is a tall who loves only him. She has sworn ‘Blue to you forever, Gray to the little rat, go to bed.’ I fink it’s bads all over.It ends: Henry and Mabel ought to but can’t. Childness ...”

“... on Sixth Avenue in New York while earning a living (just about) as a cleaner, busboy and removals man. At night, he sometimes took to the streets to declaim Shakespeare soliloquies, freed by the thought that he needed no one’s permission to play ‘Prospero, Falstaff, Shylock or Macbeth’ in the dark of the city:If the hour was late and you heard the sound ...”

“... to Yachtspersons, Comedians and Gospel Groups, requires a ‘good health certificate’, chest X-ray, HIV test result and statement of good character ‘from your local police authorities’. China asks if you have a ‘serious mental disorder’ or infectious pulmonary tuberculosis. Saudi visas are in the gift of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You must ...”

“... lying on the grass with a girl – a girl who had not been so circumspect as my aunt, with a man who was ignorant of the best local courting geography. In this way, we hoped to see sex in flagrante. I don’t think we ever did but sometimes a man in dark blue – navy blue – bell-bottoms would rise from a clearing in ...”

“... the regimented hostility of his opponents, fuelled by racially charged resentment of a black man in the White House. No one can blame Obama for his reluctance to provoke racist violence, yet no matter how cautiously he proceeds, he can never satisfy his right-wing detractors. The other explanation is that Obama was never that radical in the first ...”

“... void, and I doubt your Omnipotency will never speak the word for such a creation, as any honest man shall say when he hath looked upon it, that it is very good.’ The authorities were concerned, though, by a related image in Book One which describes Satan’s obscured glory: as when the sun new ris’n Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his ...”

“... in Asquith’s Cabinet: ‘I have often thought that your father would have been a happier man if he had taken an occasional glass of whisky, as I do.’ Derry is ebulliently confident of soon tasting the fruits of high office.27 March 1997. Seated next to John Prescott at lunch at the Chamber of Shipping. Am careful not to mention the last ...”