“... into another medium. Television had no doubt seeped into him, as into almost everyone. It is a nice point whether he connected his ‘sequence of images’ with those that appear on the screen. Certainly he was in no sense writing a scenario, or anything like one. As a novel sequence, The Raj Quartet is constructed with enormous care, tact and ...”

“... him out of the kingdom long before his true parentage could be revealed and he could marry that nice Susannah York. Fielding died in 1754 and was succeeded at Bow Street by his half-brother John: ‘blind John’ as he had been since the age of 19, ‘Sir John’ as he became in 1761, after successfully agitating to be knighted so as to increase the ...”

“... had not been a particularly intellectual woman, or, according to some witnesses, a particularly nice one. Whether Lewis mostly worshipped her or mostly suffered her, or both or neither, we don’t really know. He began by needing her and ended by looking after her; perhaps it was not such an unusual relationship. In 1926 Lewis began a friendship that was to ...”

“... those photographs now and am struck by how many of the women present were wearing Chanel suits and David Webb bracelets’), one mood from another. The bassinette was a turning point: ‘Until the bassinette it had all seemed casual, even blithe, not different in spirit from the Jax jerseys and printed cotton Lilly Pulitzer shifts we were all wearing that ...”

“... put to fresh use, and the residents of the new villas, though infrequently encountered, seemed nice enough. And surely it was a good thing that orderly lawns and gravel drives had replaced the hazardous bunkers and rusting coils of barbed wire. Nobody thought to wonder why we didn’t know who had bought the land from the War Office; or who (if they were ...”

“... and a loner.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Armstrong said. ‘It’s just that it’s nice to get out of the office once in a while.’ At the pre-launch press conference with Aldrin and Collins, a journalist asked Armstrong whether he would have anything ‘suitably historical and memorable to say when he performed the symbolic act of stepping on ...”

“... child. Before the law, or outside it? ‘How is the institution of the removal centre legal?’ David Herd asks in his afterword to Refugee Tales (2016), a collection of stories gathered from refugees by campaigners. ‘Since, in conventional terms, it plainly offends legal principles, what relation does such a site have to the law?’ There are for the ...”

“... That’s all I’m having to do with Victoria Beckham, except to say that she and her husband, David, in their relationship with the press, have taken the notion of abuse, the abuse of one set of human beings by another, to levels that make Billy Connolly’s childhood seem like a chapter from The Swiss Family Robinson. They may be right to feel hunted by ...”

“... Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David Bowie; this must mean something. But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy.No, I was not the right reader, then, for I am more certain of the parameters of mysticism than philosophy, at least as it is practised by those who ...”

“... body is agile and youthful. I’ve seen her naked, and it’s all natural.’ It would be nice to know exactly how many people in the audience were thinking: ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.’ In any case: ‘She looks better with her clothes off than on . . . The little woman is perfect, vertically and horizontally.’ The party cost ...”

“... a young man were to be heightened by the ‘drive against male vice’ initiated in 1954 under David Maxwell Fyfe as home secretary, whose most notable victim was Lord Montagu, imprisoned for 12 months for homosexual offences. On the Tube, Forster closely observes an ‘enormous young foreigner’. Was he perhaps ‘a Cossack dancer? I would have asked ...”

“... homosexuals: Alexandra in O Pioneers!, Thea in The Song of the Lark, Claude Wheeler and David Gerhardt in One of Ours, Euclide Auclair in Shadows on the Rock, and of course those two priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop. In The Professor’s House we hit pay dirt: according to various commentators, not just Professor St Peter and Tom Outland ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... to reply cheerfully to any ugly name you might call it. Hi, I’m the Nightmare of Consumption. Nice to meet you! The Corrections, as well as being a far better novel than Jameson’s stricture on an ‘exhausted realism’ would suggest it could be, is a central instance of the literary populism that we can now recognise as one of the main trends of the ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”