“... and almost always for a man: ‘Poor Ted.’ Over the years the name changed, ‘Poor Roger’ (my first husband), ‘Poor Peter’ (her son), ‘Poor Martin’ (or any other man who she thought had been treated badly by a woman). But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my time, if only by weeks, in the same way that the end ...”

“... Mme Proust stammers her quotation, Marcel interjects that he can’t bear to be without her. Roger Duchêne coolly insists that this is just a draft of a novel: ‘A beautiful scene, a too beautiful scene. The notebooks are not a place of confessions but of sketches of scenes for the work to come.’ Jean-Yves Tadié doesn’t mention the scene at ...”

“... more Newman ran down the geometric abstraction of Mondrian as well as the formalist criticism of Roger Fry; he saw a ‘disdain for the self’ in both. ‘The new painter,’ Newman insisted, ‘is concerned with his subject matter, with his thought.’ The term ‘plasmic image’ didn’t catch on, but he had more luck with ‘ideographic picture’, the ...”

“... which the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has ignored. Instead, he is eager to approve a young ultra-right protégé of his, previously rated ‘not qualified’ by the American Bar Association, as a lifetime judge. Although the majority of the one hundred senators are elderly and at risk in such a large gathering, the Capitol’s attending physician ...”

“... sport, but Kingsley Amis belongs in its hall of fame, one of the all-time greats. When Roger Micheldene, the central character in his 1963 novel, One Fat Englishman, is warned that he’s about to say something he’ll be sorry for, he replies, ‘those are the only things I really enjoy saying’ – and there isn’t much sign that Micheldene or ...”

“... Everyone is in high spirits. Among those chattering girlishly as spring rolls and won ton arrive: Young but already world-famous deconstructionist literary critic, long involved in a lesbian relationship with an older professor at Yale. Somewhat mannish, chain-smoking medievalist of mysterious inclinations, with whom Famous ...”

“... which are heavily populated with barely pubescent bed partners. With the possible exception of Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake (‘a young rosy girl in an ATS uniform’) in the wartime London of Gravity’s Rainbow – Pynchon does not find a place in his fiction for any such ‘real-life’ sharing or ...”

“... robbery and rape of a woman of 88; gang warfare, vandalism, uriniferous subways, bent policemen. Roger Scruton devoted a Times column to a crude misreading of a poem by Reading about Lebanon, a controversy to which Ukulele Music alludes. Reading’s charlady supplies a suitable retort to Scruton – ‘When we want you to chirp up matey, we’ll rattle the ...”

“... adventure. He could have travelled in his youth had he been willing to put up with great hardship. Young Oliver Goldsmith hiked over the Continent, staying at various universities and earning his way by debating. This was not Johnson’s style: he could endure physical deprivation, certainly, but not the psychic deprivation of loneliness. His expansive ...”

“... him through France, en route to yellow jersey and victor’s laurels: the vehicle carrying young James Murdoch, his Team Sky paymaster. The other stroke of luck with the gold medal was that David Cameron, with his reverse Midas touch, chose not to make the time-trial finish at Hampton Court one of his photo opportunities. While Cameron, with his ...”

“... a close-up study of applied science. The lab in question was at the Salk Institute, where Roger Guillemin, an endocrinologist, had been at work on a project that later earned him a Nobel with his rival Andrew Schally for ‘discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain’. Latour embedded himself in Guillemin’s lab, describing ...”

“... saloon of state’.The light, space and clarity of Kettle’s Yard was part of the reaction to Roger Fry’s ‘age of the ottoman and the whatnot’, and Ede was in revolt from childhood. At twelve he had saved £8 from his pocket money and, instead of the expected bicycle, used it to buy a Queen Anne desk, which he kept all his life. He didn’t enjoy ...”

“... a six-note glockenspiel in its rump including miniature bells and hammers. The rest are secular: young women holding lutes, citterns and mandolins. An account of one of these players by the art historian Fritz Saxl from 1936 describes the way it moves with ‘a combination of stateliness and grace … The feet move slowly, the figure seems to float. The ...”

“... you go back to the hotel?’); sexual longing, confusion and mad passions; teenage marriage, young motherhood, and a Doll’s House bolt; soaring ambition accompanied by wracking self-doubt; an arduous climb to the top that left her competitors littered on the slopes; mortal illness, and near miraculous recovery; heroism, heartache, more heroism and more ...”

“... of Apple Computers, Stuart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Record-breaking athletes like Roger Bannister find their way onto the roll of honour, as does the Salieri of Amadeus: a peak performer deflected from his mission by hopeless envy of Mozart’s inimitable achievement (there are heights, as Garfield admits, which really can’t be scaled by ...”