“... was too liberal-minded for that, which meant he ran the Party well’); the future Party leader, Michael Harmel (‘the brains of the Party and one of the laziest men I ever knew. Both things came from his private income – he didn’t have to work so he just sat around and read books’); and Ruth First (‘a tremendously able woman but very arrogant ...”

“... it was entirely in character that on her husband’s becoming Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George she adopted the style of an (honorary) knight’s wife, though she had no right to it – was not wise in the management of a tough little boy and systematically denied him any display of love at all. Her own fortunes in love had been ...”

“... to be funny. I suppose otherwise they’d never laugh at all. In their biography The Real Romney, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman write that ‘within the family, Romney’s zany side was well known.’* They give two examples: Romney assuming ‘the voices of cartoon characters’ in letters home from Bordeaux, where he was a missionary in the late ...”

“... and waistcoat, Mam in her shiny straw hat, both of them never able to keep their faces straight when being photographed. In the back garden butterflies cluster on the buddleia, mostly red admirals which look black from behind, with the cabbage whites preferring the catmint.Good remark by Francis Bacon: ‘No point in being both old and shy.’7 ...”

“... enclosure, perhaps the kailyard where the inhabitants grew their greens; a landing-place where two straight lines of boulders run out into the sea; a burn for fresh water. A substantial ruin with sharp (i.e. modern) corners must be the inn identified by Donald and Jill MacLean, whose papers I’ve been reading in the cultural centre nearby in Kildonan: ‘A ...”

“... adventurer you cannot just browse through their journals, notes and maps. You have to look them straight in the face’ – first removing any six-inch moths – ‘to find out why they have made the hard choice between reading about adventure or living it.’ But the steaming rank animal of the armchair has the drop on people like Pelton Young: we are more ...”

“... is a self-proclaimed Sapphist. In one chapter of this book Gingrich calls with an apparently straight face for abstention from pre-marital sex. But could anyone except an amoral child of the counter-culture have pulled off the ‘Republican revolution’? The requirements of partisanship probably have a lot to do with this apparent contradiction. As ...”

“... terms that combine philosophy and the history of sexuality. Butler’s assertion that ‘gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of “the original” … reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the original’ is a passage frequently quoted by gender scholars ...”

“... a bibliography. He is what he watches, late at night. Charles Hawtrey, in his youthful pomp, in Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale. Hawtrey (pre-booze) with Will Hay. James Fox’s strangulated Elephant and Castle in Performance. Hitchcock’s expressionist version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Seabrook’s work, before the wonderful accident of All the ...”

“... and Nagasaki, various sites in the Australian desert (hence the title of the 1988 film by Michael Pattinson and Bruce Myles), in Nevada or Siberia, in the Gobi desert, in the South Pacific. The terrorist attack is thus assimilated to the many instances of nuclear explosions, all caused by nation-states and many caused by ‘us’ and people on ‘our ...”

“... notice there’s no attempt to offer an etymology of this word gunk or gonk, which I take to be a straight borrowing from the Donegal pronunciation of the phrase agamharc, ‘seeing, looking, having a vision’. I mull this over as I stare into the groodles or ‘bits at the bottom of a soup bowl’ in that Thai place on Oxford’s main drag, then take a ...”

“... in cold rain, where you could not see the sunset. Caleb’s toes emerged out of the mud in a row, straight as piano keys, his feet together, his weight evenly balanced. Although his testicles were hanging free, where you would have expected to see a penis there was a thin six-inch tube of brittle gourd sticking vertically into the air. A string tied round his ...”

“... So many lies have been told about Liszt that the main objective must be to set the record straight. Walker doesn’t even scrutinise Liszt’s belief in the Weihekuss and he finds the whole business about Don Juan ‘pathological’. According to Walker, Liszt only ever had sex with three women, all of them married to other men: Countess Marie ...”

“... had to anchor at Havre Gosselin instead, which meant mounting a precarious fifty-step ladder straight up the rocks: a proper jetty was built only in 1912. Walkers could access one of the best beaches, at Port es Saies, by means of a rope hanging over the cliff.Victorians and Edwardians who took this sort of thing in their stride made Sark a tourist ...”

“... TV show Ready Steady Go!, and appeared in other films as well as Russell’s, including Alfie with Michael Caine. How much of her reputation came from her art and how much from herself is a question that haunts Kristal’s book as well as Pauline Boty: A Portrait, the catalogue for an exhibition of her work at Gazelli Art House earlier this year. Both have ...”