“... indexes of their own books into distinct satires, long series of mocking entries presented with a straight face. Bentley’s qualities, for instance, included ‘egregious dulness … Pedantry … familiar acquaintance with Books that he never saw’. No one did this sort of thing more skilfully than Pope. The index to his magnificent parody of the scholarly ...”

“... These limitations become more apparent when Hitchens writes about the Left. He tears into Michael Foot for his ‘treacly exaggerations’, his awful sentimentality, his Beaverbrook-worship and his ‘glutinous style’. Fine. But the fact that his general angle of attack on Foot is from the left, and his judgment that Foot ‘has never been otherwise ...”

“... Morality Play, it summons up the devils and demons that await those who stray from the theological straight and narrow. This in turn agrees with the play’s ostensible message, which is that Faustus’s aspirations as a magician lead him into an alliance with the devil, and so to eternal damnation. ‘Regard his hellish fall,’ the Chorus grimly ...”

“... had no idea where Latimer was. When they persisted, however, she agreed that she’d probably gone straight from planting the bomb in Manchester to Latimer, where she’d driven around in a car similar to the suspicious red one which had been seen in the area before the bombing. After that there was a bit of a hiccup in the investigation. Police inquiries ...”

“... Anglo-American scholarship, the record of Mozart’s later career has probably been put about as straight as it will get. There remain a few mysteries, as the documentation of these years is – considering Mozart’s growing reputation during the period – surprisingly sparse. Few of his letters survive, fewer still that were written to him; many were ...”

“... Peter Sutcliffe for the 13 murders he committed in the North of England between 1975 and 1980, Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney-General, rose to tell the Judge that the Crown was dropping the charge of murder in favour of a guilty plea for manslaughter. Havers said that all the evidence tended towards the conclusion that ‘this is a case of diminished ...”

“... in the back as he crawled away on his hands and knees. The bullet entered his buttock and went straight through his heart. Someone had filmed the young man’s death, so there was no doubt about what he was doing. Widgery concluded that the bullet which got him must have been intended for someone else. The likelihood, suggested by the evidence and by what ...”

“... hard stuff, of course, is a different matter. Uncollected in the Faber anthology is a moment in Michael Wharton’s ‘Peter Simple’ memoir when one of the more heroic Fleet Street pub-performers kept a long-postponed appointment with his doctor. After tapping and humming away, the quack inquired mildly; ‘D’you drink at all?’ Well-primed for the ...”

“... Presumably the inspiration here was Kipling’s story ‘Proofs of Holy Writ’, but the idiom is straight Bardic Romance: ‘New Place, when he got there, was bright as a rubbed angel, Anne his wife and Judith his daughter yet unmarried having nought much to do save buff and sweep and pick up hairs from the floor. The mulberry tree was doing well.’ Yet, if ...”

“... openings of the unequal hills’. As her biographers point out, this makes a line that could be straight out of The Prelude: ‘Through different openings of the unequal hills.’ Since William and Dorothy lived in each other’s consciousness at this stage, the thing is natural enough, and William was speaking no more than the truth when he wrote that ...”

“... close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as I’ve ever come across in the movies. But no one has ever been as repeatedly and consistently sinister, morally ...”

“... to tell the difference between them. Clark’s quip (although it wasn’t really his) about how Michael Heseltine had to buy his own furniture was widely cited as the nadir of bona fide toffdom. But was Alan Clark himself a toff? His family millions had been amassed by his great-grandfather, a Paisley textiles merchant. Newish money, then, but older ...”

“... In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t healthy ...”

“... wave’ science fiction, a quasi-modernist movement centred on New Worlds and figures such as Michael Moorcock, who took over from Carnell as the magazine’s editor in 1964, and M. John Harrison, who became its literary editor in 1968.Ballard’s own fiction was by then moving into its second major phase. This followed a second life-defining trauma. In ...”

“... offices of great causes. Among them was the Africa Bureau, led with arctic integrity by the Rev. Michael Scott, with Mary Benson – just as dedicated but warm and welcoming – by his side. Close by was the Aborigines’ Protection Society, run by Tommy Fox Pitt. A dignified, slightly military gentleman, Tommy had been a district officer on the Copperbelt ...”