“... ambulances, the black marias – reminding you of a natural affinity between the fly on the wall and carrion. In one of the news updates which has to hold its own in the ratings alongside this kind of thing, the matched anchors – the usual his ‘n’ hers combo, suggesting an April-October wedding – revealed that a boy of 11 had been gated by his ...”

“... shows a phalanx of unpainted male prostitutes, leaning on some railings. Watching for a cab, Stephen Fry’s Wilde makes eye contact with one of them. ‘Looking for someone?’ asks the lad (identified as ‘Rent-boy’ in the closing credits), and Fry stares helplessly across the street. Gilbert does all he can to italicise the moment, but since Fry ...”

“... he is travelling with? It is not clear, and the ambiguity is irritating rather than felicitous. ‘Wall Street’ begins as a neat vignette of men at the bar ‘like frogs with relaxed throats’, and ends: But on afternoons lit By the glitter and disposal of money, They show often a flawed Honesty, a sense of defiance At what the hunt has done to ...”

“... in the press, though it had already sent itself up in its inaugural programme, How to Listen, by Stephen Potter and Joyce Grenfell – the first of many satires, including Henry Reed’s high-camp Hilda Tablet comedies and Third Division, the comedy show that turned into the Goons. But mostly the press response was respectful. The social and political ...”

“... Duras, Ballard, Virilio and above all Vonnegut. There are quotations from Vonnegut on the wall outside the show’s entrance, a copy of Slaughterhouse 5 is displayed in the first room, and Richard Peter’s photograph of a statue overlooking the firebombed cityscape of Dresden is on the front cover of the catalogue. All these authors explore the ...”

“... The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan Carl Mathews’s ‘Severances’, and John Levett’s ‘The Photographs of Paris’. The first two are longish, the others shorter. The only one that won a prize – and that the smallest, £100 – is ‘Corolla’, a sequence of nine exactly rhymed and metred sonnets, culminating in a stunning version of the Ronsard sonnet that defeated Yeats: When you are old and lost in memory you might, seized by a sentimental fit, take down this book and blow the dust off it recalling: ‘Bosley was quite keen on me ...”

“... The 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall was merrier than the tenth. In 1999, Berlin was in the middle of a hangover. The European Union was plagued by doubts about its future course; the bloodbath in the former Yugoslavia had unnerved optimists; the Russian economy had collapsed; the sullen misery and unemployment in what had been East Germany seemed to mock the hopes of real unification ...”

“... pedagogy. No such contradictions assail the editors of the Longman Exam Guides, who preface Martin Stephen’s English Literature* with the observation that ‘much has been said in recent years about declining standards and disappointing exam results. While this may be somewhat exaggerated, examiners are well aware that the performance of many candidates ...”

“... metal. Tables stained in Jacobean oak were topped with easy-wipe, machine-dimpled copper. Wall-studs were newly exposed or newly installed, painted or stained black, and smothered with freshly-minted brass. On every wall the traditional black-and-gold plastic of Hogarth frames was screwed to the flock ...”

“... Lido in the old city. He was shot as he scrambled ashore from a tank that had backed through the wall into the Indian Ocean. In a district called Wadajir, food distribution has to be suspended after threats from gunmen. Many Somalis stay away from Mogadishu’s ganglands, and the supplies of food that might keep their children alive, because of the ...”

“... Xtopher,’ Stephen Spender wrote in April 1931, ‘is a cactus.’ Prickly, solitary, self-sufficient, hard to handle and difficult to love. How to get to grips with ‘Isherwood’ (as he has chosen to address him) was a problem for Peter Parker: something that perhaps explains the 12 years this usually brisk biographer has spent on his task ...”

“... just joined them.’ ‘Robin, at that moment in the cottage near Skipton, was eating dinner with Stephen.’ Surely the art of narration ought to be a little less blatant than this? Since the novelist can hardly simulate the essentially voyeuristic pleasure of the Dallas cut – when we observe with our own eyes the switch from the legitimate domicile to the ...”

“... as a Kumbaya invitation to join hands for a moral-historical promenade. In reality, as Stephen Ellis was able to show in 2011, Mandela joined the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party in 1960 to help impose the SACP’s strategic choice of armed struggle on a reluctant ANC leadership. Mandela was the first leader of the ANC’s ...”

“... the city – their presence betrayed by a string of washing visible through a gaping hole in the wall. Most of the refugees say that they will never return to an Iraq ruled by Saddam. They talk of the signs which Iraqi soldiers put on their tanks as they crushed the March rebellion: ‘No Shia after today.’ But some of the younger men in the camps insist ...”

“... in Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, and he performs the same manoeuvre: ‘Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed over the area railings, compressed his hat on his head, grasped two points at the lower union of rails and stiles, lowered his body gradually by its length of five feet nine inches and a half to within two feet ten inches of the area pavement and ...”