“... a doll’s house’. On occasion he thinks of himself in the third person – ‘Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique’ – or has strange, charged moments of apprehension: ‘My mind drifted through waves of false memory, in which I seemed to do the same thing over and over again, go to the same places, meet the ...”

“... it was necessary to find a practitioner one could trust. The 14th-century French physician Guy de Chauliac was unusual in being surgically trained, and was preoccupied with this issue of trust. In his seven-volume Chirurgia Magna he wrote that ‘a doctor should be willing to learn, be sober and modest, charming, hard-working and intelligent. He should ...”

“... on a hideous yacht. The romance went out of New Romanticism the minute the band’s bass player, John Taylor, in the video for the single ‘Rio’, crawled up the beach with a rifle to help a lady who was being splashed with champagne, followed quickly by their singer, Simon Le Bon, diving into the blue Antiguan waters wearing a pair of budgie ...”

“... squeaks. The lettristes came to include such luminaries as Maurice Lemaître, Gil J. Wolman and Guy Debord as well as students, drunks and petty criminals. Many of them really believed that Isou was a messiah, even, briefly, Debord, who thereafter made it his life’s mission to undermine him. In 1952, Debord and Wolman founded a splinter group called the ...”

“... topics; nobody’s in here just because he was a long-time acolyte or even that pleasant guy in the next office. The book was planned as a festschrift, but on its way to the press its mission has been re-defined as a commemorative offering, following Ehrenpreis’s sad death in an accident in July 1985. The full range of scholarly interests which ...”

“... opening of Officers and Gentlemen. It is a scene Feigel might have quoted at more length, in which Guy Crouchback and Ian Kilbannock stand in Piccadilly during an air-raid, arguing about whether the night sky, riven with fire and the beams of searchlights, is more like a Turner or a John Martin. Further down St James’s ...”

“... allow the commentary to continue none the less. Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling was usually the fall-guy: INTERVIEWER: Sir Arthur, where did you strat your work? SIR ARTHUR: I think it can be said of me that I have never ever stratted my work. This is one thing I have never done. I can lay my hand on my heart, or indeed anyone else’s heart, and say: ‘I ...”

“... grotesque clown. This is the mode in which Morecambe and Wise began, mimicking the hard-edged wise-guy contentiousness of Abbott and Costello and writing it small on the British variety stage. Very small. Their partnership was established in 1940 when both, already seasoned entertainers, were in their mid-teens. As Morecambe would later recall, they were at ...”

“... sense of comradeship with one another, but because many of them liked it; they wanted to fight. To Guy Chapman war was ‘a mistress – once you have lain in her arms you can admit no other’. Teilhard de Chardin spoke of discovering within oneself ‘an underlying stream of clarity, energy and freedom that is to be found hardly anywhere in ordinary ...”

“... Voorhees’s study is different. He highlights the all-important fact that in October 1962 John F. Kennedy was about to face congressional midterm elections. The results would determine the fate of his presidency, as well as his prospects for re-election in 1964. Kennedy’s New Frontier domestic agenda – which promised a huge house-building ...”

“... in my cellblock had broken a plastic pen into shards and tried to swallow them. I heard about a guy in the men’s wing who had used his cooking stove and a plastic bag to asphyxiate himself. You could hang yourself with a bedsheet. I even thought that if I threw myself at the bed frame in just the right way, I could hit my head hard enough to bludgeon ...”

“... And the lead role has attracted all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire 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 ...”

“... figure. A belief in his national importance led to his refusal in 1794 to visit his radical friend John Thelwall – when Thelwall was in Newgate charged with treason – on the grounds that Godwin must not jeopardise his own life, ‘this treasure which does not belong to me but to the public’. It is hard not to be reminded of the passage Jane Austen had ...”

“... vicious war, of which he was the leading orchestrator on the Irish side. On the evening before Guy Fawkes in 1920, 11 lorry-loads of British troops entered Granard, sacking the town and burning the Greville Arms to the ground, in retaliation for the shooting dead of a police inspector in the hotel bar four days before. The hotel was rebuilt, but after the ...”

“... designed and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a wider range of ambiguous ...”