“... like Toscanini staring down a dodgy woodwind section. Olivier Messaien was commissioned by Alice Tully to write a piece inspired by the canyons of Cedar Breaks, Zion and Bryce in southwestern Utah. The composer enjoyed a mild form of synesthesia, which allowed him to hear colours. The red and orange of the sandstone cliffs got him going, along with the ...”

“... surgeon’s hand half a year’, during which he ‘did undergo much pain and sorrow’. Margaret Walker of Coggeshall in Essex lost her husband at Sherborne; he was in the revolutionary Thomas Rainborough’s regiment, and left her ‘a poor distressed widow’. There were hundreds of similar stories.Strangways was himself a victim. The man who proclaimed ...”

“... Shirley Williams, say – funeral attendees were interrogated about the legacy. Rarely can such an Alice in Wonderland charivari of local stereotypes have been assembled, some of them (like Dave and Samantha Cameron) quite obviously having a good time, with smiles and quips and cute photo-op hand-holding. The front rows were a woodpeckerish blizzard of Judas ...”

“... simply saying: ‘I was stupid. I got busted. It sucks.’ He blames cocaine, he blames Johnny Walker Black, he blames overwork, he blames manic depression, he blames his colleagues, he blames his many relatives in prison, he blames the paper for not taking enough interest in the Holocaust, he blames white America, he blames black America, he blames fast ...”

“... vivid and significant passages of the book, as Beauvoir, fortified by her customary shot of Johnny Walker, unflinchingly, if often irritably, responded to Bair’s questions about every aspect of her life from philosophy to menstruation and menopause. But when Bair complained about the lack of documentation, and questioned Beauvoir about the whereabouts of her ...”

“... of North Carolina to the Florida coast at St Augustine. Throughout her life Woolson was a walker and a rower, and her method of exploring new terrain was to take off by herself, as she apparently did, like a pacific version of her great-uncle’s deerslayer, soon after arriving in Florida: I walk miles through the hummocks, where it looks as though ...”

“... disappear from Tristes Tropiques. There Lévi-Strauss casts himself as a Rousseau-like solitary walker among the natives, a melancholy traveller at the edge of civilisation. Wilcken’s account of the expedition is like an ethnographic version of Fitzcarraldo, as Lévi-Strauss succumbs to depression and scribbles away at a play, a companion piece to ...”

“... afflicted by overweening arrogance, dogmatic certainty and a self-destructive fondness for Johnnie Walker Black. In spite of his extraordinary talent, which led him from the back-country of Luoland in western Kenya to the graduate economics programme at Harvard, he ended his life at 46 as a mid-level bureaucrat in Nairobi, a hopeless drunk, recently married ...”