“... three hundred people ended up making love in the desert. ‘Around Death Valley today,’ Beverley Walker wrote in 1992, ‘there isn’t a single reference to Zabriskie Point, not a trace. Not a single person I spoke with – rangers, personnel at the ranch, hotel, restaurant and tourist office – had ever heard of the film.’Harrison’s third wife was the ...”

“... and death to the ex-peacenik types transporting it: ‘So much for the lover, the samurai, the Zen walker’, and so much for the commune, long reduced to a drug-addled cult. A Flag for Sunrise and Damascus Gate propel various Americans – tepid liberals, religious idealists, strung-out psychopaths – into violent collision during, respectively, revolution ...”

“... of interest to literate businessmen. Sent on assignment to Alabama in 1936, with the photographer Walker Evans, to do an article on tenant farmers, he returned with unorganised pages and sections of finished prose, prose-in-the-rough, poetry, extended captions and descriptions, none of them reducible to an article in Fortune. Agee’s manuscript kept soaking ...”

“... phase of Confederate commemorations – is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the ...”

“... was slow to appreciate the real threats to national security from Northern Ireland, as both Stephen Lander (the head of the agency from 1996 to 2002) and his successor, Eliza Manningham-Buller, admitted when I interviewed them many years later. Though a senior MI5 officer took on the role of director and co-ordinator of intelligence in 1972, the RUC ...”

“... in the sun, – its shadows running down in the water like a column.’ Coleridge became a fell-walker on a scale more heroic even than Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s sailor brother John. As Stephen Gill acutely points out in his recent Wordsworth biography, an excellent companion piece to Holmes on Coleridge, ‘Coleridge ...”

“... Goodbye. And with this tone and image and allusion – the lightly parodied bravery, the lonely walker, the angels on a pin – we suddenly seem quite close to Machado after all. Machado’s scenery is traditional and rural, rivers, olive trees, autumn, sunlight, long melancholy evenings, and his diction is composed and sedate. But there are also roads ...”

“... a Young Man, he asked Katherine Mullin, a senior lecturer at Leeds University, the extent to which Stephen Dedalus’s character was based on Joyce himself. ‘That,’ Mullin reasonably replied, ‘is an extremely complex question.’ ‘Well,’ Bragg snapped back, ‘I want an extremely simple answer to it so that we can move on.’ Truly, he is the ...”

“... Political cartoonists sometimes depicted Lincoln in the guise of Charles Blondin, a tightrope walker famous for crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire, navigating a dangerous course without leaning too far to the left or right. Reynolds describes Lincoln as a ‘political Blondin’, who chose an ideologically balanced ‘Blondin-like’ Cabinet and sought ...”

“... city is set against the closed world of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Conrad shows O’Henry and Stephen Crane plucking characters from the crowd; Jacob Riis using photography to document the inhumanities of slum tenements, Stieglitz using it to make skyscrapers monumental; Oldenburg embracing the city by making toys out of monuments, and monuments out of ...”

“... won seven world titles, an achievement equalled only by the game’s dominant player in the 1990s, Stephen Hendry. He has made more century breaks – at the time of writing, 1240 – and more 147s (the maximum score you can get in a single frame) in tournament play than anyone else. O’Sullivan was given the nickname ‘Rocket’ early on, because of his ...”

“... careful of for the future. It’s the same state of affairs I noticed once when having supper with Stephen Spender, namely that he was telling me lots of stories I knew already. But of course I only knew them because he had already published them in book form. There’s very little in the back of the shop is the message; now that it’s all out on the shelves ...”

“... was surely there to be read, but they would not allow it to be heard. The Commission had announced Stephen Foster when they were actually playing Wagner. Surely, critics who had followed the true score should have pointed that out?A good question, but perhaps one that only literature can answer. ‘Critics’ – the press, the academics, the think-tankers ...”

“... is even better. Lea as ley, it always had that feel. A route out. A river track that walked the walker, a wet road. The Lea fed our Hackney dreaming: a water margin. On any morning when the city was squeezing too hard, you could get your hit of rus in urbe. Hackney Marshes giving way to the woodyards of Lea Bridge Road, to Springfield Park; reservoir ...”

“... films provide. (‘More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source,’ Stephen Ambrose is supposed to have said, and for better or worse, I believe him.) But you notice, after a while, that the errors all face in a certain direction, and serve to make the same points, while all the things that are supposed to stay under the carpet ...”