“... like his name sounded, describing the head of the British National Oil Corporation (BNOC), Sir Frank Kearton, as ‘an inside guy at the skunk works’. Unfortunately, Harvie is an intellectual magpie and his book is irritatingly, or rather maddeningly, written, a series of digressions about every subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to ...”

“... that I first came across Malley’s poems, nestled up against an audacious collaboration between Frank O’Hara and the French language.) Both Ashbery and Koch have included Malley in the curricula of their university poetry courses. At exam time Ashbery would present his students with two unattributed poems, one from The Darkening Ecliptic and one from ...”

“... being drawn into Kim Novak in Vertigo is a model of the way we are sucked into films. Charming Robert Walker and boring Farley Granger make a trap for our need to identify. The method of Rear Window – a voyeur in the dark inspecting other lives – is the principle of cinematic spectacle. Hitchcock’s best films all grow out of his instinctive ...”

“... would have understood and approved the Roman indignation with which Housman spurned an admiring Frank Harris, writing how much he appreciated the ‘sarcasm’ of ‘1887’. ‘I can only reject and resent your truculent praise,’ replied Housman. Yet Horace, or the Greek poets, would no more have recognised their poetry in Housman’s versions of it than ...”

“... the Treasury after New Labour’s victory. Robinson’s fortune had been inflated by dealings with Robert Maxwell, the Channel Island tax havens and a legacy from a satirically named Madame Bourgeois, a Belgian heiress. He had no political base in the Commons and may have felt it politic to bankroll Blair’s closest ally. Mandelson did not declare his ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... are many distinguished analytic philosophers, particularly admirers of Kripke like David Lewis and Frank Jackson, who are unabashed physicalist metaphysicians. They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against Heidegger. These ...”

“... had changed his mind about the authenticity of the ‘diaries’. Why, then, did he not inform Frank Giles, editor of the Sunday Times, who was left to hear the frightful news from Lord Dacre when his first edition was already on the trains? The Porter sections on political lying and fabrication provide essential evidence for the New Bullying. In that ...”

“... names added to theirs for easier identification, producing such unfortunate sobriquets as ‘Fanny Frank’. As one Victorian Wedgwood complained, after hearing of yet another batch of boring little Darwins, ‘we have enough dullness in the family and plenty of virtue – a little vice would make a pleasant variety.’ It is difficult not to agree. Some, of ...”

“... psychology and the backchat of a paperhanger’. Sticking to his guns, he became (in the words of Frank O’Connor) ‘the greatest of all English storytellers’.Times change. Mention Coppard today and you’ll be met with blank looks. Until recently I knew him only by name, one I associated with a brand of gently nostalgic, middlebrow English writers who ...”

“... by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is still contested.) Twenty-five years before I went to Loos for the centenary of the ...”

“... querulous and troublesome dependents: the blind poet Anna Williams; the drunk and morose physician Robert Levet, commemorated by Johnson in a beautifully spare poem of 1782; a young black servant, Frank Barber, whom he sent to school at his own expense, and to whom he left a large sum of money; and the ‘surly slut’ Poll ...”

“... up to and including testing, without having a human spy to witness it and tell us about it. He is frank about the numerous instances in which the whole detection apparatus failed, as it did in the first Soviet test of August 1949; the ‘Vela’ explosion in the South Atlantic in September 1979; the detonation by India of several devices, one ...”

“... In 1918, Capablanca, the famously instinctive Cuban prodigy, played the Ruy Lopez opening against Frank Marshall and was presented with a new, ingenious, aggressive defence. Marshall, it turned out, had kept his innovation unrevealed for ten years, waiting to unleash it on the player he most wanted to beat. Capablanca saw the prepared series of attacks and ...”

“... door with his brusque ‘Ullo, ullo, ullo’ to wreck any chance of intimacy. The scripts were by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, very funny in their day and funny enough now. Ken Livingstone’s mother was an Eth: Ethel Ada Kennard, a dancer in a three-women act that toured the music halls. His father was a Bob: Robert Moffat ...”