“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the country. And whenever we think ministers cannot sink any lower, they do: the proposal to x-ray the teeth and skeletons of underage asylum-seekers to see whether they are in fact children (and thus eligible for more generous treatment) is scarcely believable. The anti-terror legislation has only turned the screw. Although terror is a problem partly of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Fair in New York City, the wilder half of the Perry Lane crowd was on the bus too, and the man at the wheel was Neal Cassady, the legendary long-distance driver of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Stone was part of the Perry Lane crowd, but when the hijinks began to eat into his writing time he slipped away. Kesey’s voyage east with the Merry Pranksters ...”

“... Duke Ellington’s ten-man group of 1927-32 was billed for a time as the Jungle Band, a title in keeping with the Southern plantation/Afro-Deco interior and exotic-erotic floor shows of the Cotton Club, the grandest Harlem venue (it seated more than six hundred), where Ellington performed, before whites only, for the five years from 1927, and in the spring seasons of 1933, 1937 and 1938 ...”

“... who ‘stretched out like a cat, and rolled/The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue’. Or the man in ‘Modes of Pleasure’ whose triumphs ‘recurred/In different rooms without a word’, but now, older, he sits rigid, ‘brave, terrible,/The will awaits its gradual end.’ Gunn, born in 1929, studied at Cambridge before he fled England for California ...”