“... in the script and read out lyrical sentences about city fogs over footage of farmers ploughing for winter, and vice versa. The whole programme was broadcast live. The BBC cancelled the next edition. But not the show: in 1953, with only one TV channel available, nearly half the entire adult viewing public had watched the first Panorama. According to the BBC’s ...”

“... In the USSR, things had been very different: when Eisenstein restaged the storming of the Winter Palace for October, he had been allowed to close off parts of the city for hours at a time, and to deploy 8000 volunteers, many of them workers and soldiers who had taken part in the real thing; for Potemkin, he was given the use of the Black Sea Fleet for ...”

“... by means of maps and surveys; he is master of the Melville Log, the documentary project begun by Jay Leyda in 1956 and now continued by Parker in electronic (and indefinitely expanding) form. Volume II of the biography, especially, is enlivened by cantankerous outbursts against long-dead Melvilles who failed to preserve letters, or librarians who neglected ...”

“... shadows and flattening a creature’s appearance. As various commentators, including Stephen Jay Gould, have confirmed, Thayer’s theory of countershading – illustrated in DPM with images of light-bellied jet planes as well as sharks – proved that artists could bring genuine insight to this field. Thayer greatly overstated his case, however. Animal ...”

“... I read the intense, mannered love letters that Plath wrote to [Richard Sassoon] in the winter of 1955-56, I was taken back to my own youth, and to the Sassoons I was in love with and loved to write ardent, pretentious letters to. Anne Stevenson told me that she, too, had had Sassoons in her life.’ Malcolm makes much of the fact that Sassoon ...”

“... degree of suppressed hilarity: ‘You must eat orrrranges,’ when a student went down with a winter sniffle. ‘You must read Marianne Weber, then you will understand the trrragedy’ – to a student who claimed not to see the point of Max.‘Andrew, with your Kant worrrrk’, ‘Sara, your labours with Krrristeva’, ‘Tony, with your worrrk on ...”

“... columnist called Sheilah Graham, who had, he said, the look of ‘a young Zelda’. The creator of Jay Gatsby wasn’t slow to see through her persona. Sheilah Graham was actually Lily Shiel, the youngest child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, who had grown up in a Stepney Green slum. Fitzgerald took it on himself to remedy her lack of an education. When she ...”

“... technique,’ Saxton confided as he held a full syringe ‘between his squinting eye and the late winter sun’. Neugass overcame his dismay and joked in his diary that many resuscitated volunteers were by now ‘full-blooded Spaniards’. Thirty-five thousand volunteers from 53 countries took up the call of the Comintern and another four or five thousand ...”

“... to be the effortless maestro of the scene. He has willed himself into being. Gatsby is actually Jay Gatz, a poor boy from the plains, in romantic pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, the upper-class object of his desire, who once rejected him. He believes he can win her back through displays of wealth and manners, but she is now married to Tom Buchanan, an ...”