“... versions of the story; it was beside Wilde’s in another. In either case, he later wrote that he took the sponge, wiped his name out and made his way quickly to the railway station. Gide, who was 25, had met Wilde before in Paris and Florence. He left three accounts of their meeting in Algiers; some of what he said was later hotly denied by Douglas. The ...”

“... for TV. Patten, who seems to have accepted Dimbleby’s electronic eavesdropping even before he took up his post in Hong Kong, is of a generation and culture brought up on the power of TV’s seductive simplifications: if baulked by the Foreign Office, he tells Dimbleby, ‘I’ll do what I’ve always done; which is to take the first opportunity in front ...”

“... without warning – deep into one’s narcissistic wounds. Not long ago, apropos of nothing, she took mournful pleasure in observing that with my whimsical new blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention ...”

“... for having lost a note his mother once left in his lunchbox by breaking the glass on Dad’s John Coltrane poster, and Dad understands. The book’s emotional landscape may be desolate but it is fully energised. The sections flit from parable to skit to list, with sudden swerves, so that an odd dark fable about fraternal conflict ends as an exam ...”

“... of work on the hydrogen bomb to set out his case. He entrusted extracts to the Princeton physicist John Wheeler to check the accuracy of his account of the Teller-Ulam design. Intending to read the document on the overnight train from Princeton to Washington, Wheeler managed to lose it. The sleeper car was taken apart in a desperate search, but the document ...”

“... and years!’ The bouncy tone is explained by this being a fantasy of what Baker might say to John Updike in the unlikely event of their finding themselves playing a round of golf together. It was the sure convergence of apparent incompatibles that gave The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) its impact, even for readers who found William Beckwith, the studly ...”

“... which he makes Quilty recite prior to his murder, the adjectives suddenly obtrude: ‘Because you took advantage of a sin / when I was helpless moulting moist and tender ... ’ And when the young Nabokov is attracted to Tamara in Speak, Memory, his tendresse resorts to the same paired adjectives, appropriately relocated: ‘the tender, moist gleam on her ...”

“... to would-be sportsmen not only of ‘professional hunters’ but of ‘white hunters’. Roosevelt took his expedition very seriously and fired 33 letters in 18 months at Frederick Selous. (Cameron spells his middle name ‘Courtney’.) That legendary hero had very little experience of East Africa, but when Roosevelt proposed a light tent of waterproof ...”

“... Liberals did not simply inherit Republican schemes of harsh policing and extreme punishment. They took the initiative. Clinton, hailed as the ‘first black president’ by Toni Morrison, ended what he called ‘welfare as we know it’ and deregulated financial markets. Amid a national panic about ‘street terrorists’, he signed the most draconian crime ...”

“... from Cardinal Spellman to the Duchess of Windsor’.) And even in her troubled later years – she took to wearing a Wotan-like eyepatch in the 1950s, after pouring cleaning fluid into her eye instead of eyewash – she retained her dark charms. Living a hand-to-mouth existence in New York after the failure of various literary projects in the early 1960s, she ...”

“... possible without its layers and hyperlinks, the infinite opportunities it opens for research: on John Amos Comenius, for example, whose idea of ‘pansophism … a dream of information available to everyone’ she discusses as a precursor to ‘Wikipedia, which I admire and support’. In The Books of Jacob, the news about the mycelial origins of the world ...”

“... of policy and to the courts on matters of law. When a Home Secretary, Lord Halifax, was sued by John Wilkes for punitive damages for having unlawfully issued a general warrant to search for seditious papers, Chief Justice Wilmot told the jury: ‘The law makes no difference between great and petty officers. Thank God, they are all amenable to ...”

“... curator of the museum – the ‘Wonder House’. The curator is a tribute to Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, who moved to Bombay as curator of the J.J. School of Art in 1865, the year of Kipling’s birth. But through the figure of the curator, Kipling also indirectly acknowledges the existence of a colonial India of intellectual collaboration ...”

“... private game with myself and my London A to Z. But the best thing about these walks was that they took you down streets, up alleys, across back gardens, over ditches that you would never normally have visited. You would discover things: shops, cafés, old saucepans, skips full of discarded treasure ... and secret signs. The secret signs were always the ...”

“... safeguard of their brood. You feel he only stops because he has run out of animal comparisons. It took a while for this manner to change. King John, a bit later, has some intensities of a sort not to be found in its predecessors, but it remembers the old redundancies. Here Salisbury is protesting against the King’s ...”