“... he would hardly have been able to function so successfully without them. He was particularly close to President Alejandro Lanusse. Like practically everyone else, he supported the 1976 coup that ended the presidency of Isabel Peron. This was not the first coup he had supported. He was abducted next year in the common fashion by plain-clothes agents, in ...”

“... is defensive in intent (though Christopher Brasher of the Observer has sometimes come close to suggesting otherwise). It must be said that the press, and to a lesser extent television, have their problems when it comes to athletics. Not the least of the difficulties is that most discussions of running arrive fairly rapidly at the far end of what ...”

“... back, the noticeboard was taken down. That noticeboard is behind a poem ‘Spot the ball’ which Frank Ormsby wrote in the Seventies: We persevere from habit. When we try These days our hope’s mechanical, we trust To accident. We are selective No longer, the full hundred crosses Filling the sky. It was Craig Raine who pointed out that this is a poem ...”

“... when I watch the more lurid of the zombie films, it seems as though I’ve come vertiginously close to seeing the Dionysiac frenzy embodied, the god torn and rent apart, and consumed by the chorus of revellers. It is crucial somehow that the victims remain conscious as they are torn to bits or chewed up; the death must be as distressing as ...”

“... which argues that opium had a long medicinal and aphrodisiac use in China dating back centuries. Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann and Zhou Xun, historians based at SOAS, had gone further in Narcotic Culture (2004), suggesting that a ‘narcophobic’ modern state had created a largely spurious panic about the evil effects of the drug. Prostitution, too, has ...”

“... Lazar at the Beverly Hills restaurant, the Bistro, in which the Dunnes were investors. In public, Frank Sinatra had verbally attacked Lenny Dunne. Yet Dominick was his real object – Lenny was being browbeaten for bringing in an outsider. A couple of weeks later, the Dunnes were at the Daisy – another hot place in town. Sinatra, his two daughters and Mia ...”

“... Frank Doubleday, the American publisher and friend of Rudyard and Carrie Kipling, once arrived at their house in Sussex to find Rudyard in a sweat in front of the hall fireplace shovelling a pile of his manuscripts into the flames. It was a horrifying sight, especially to a publisher. ‘For heaven’s sake, Rud, what are you doing?’ Doubleday asked ...”

“... social origins and a German name perhaps strengthened her resolve. (Lady Edith soon became close to her son-in-law, who designed her a wonderful house, Homewood, on the Knebworth estate.) From the start, Emily was an outsider in her own home; when she was Lutyens’s fiancée, she began to sew their entwined initials on the bed linen, but it was ...”

“... gain in this loss of verve, since the shimmering beauty of Barry’s imagery can sail perilously close to sheer fancifulness, even absurdity: ‘Her eyes had the green of the writing on a tram ticket,’ ‘Her legs are like the slender pillars of the courthouse in Baltinglass,’ and other such embarrassments. Barry can produce prose of great splendour, but ...”

“... not valid under Swedish law, so his entire estate has gone to his brother and father. The estate, close to worthless at the time of his death, is now a multi-million-dollar concern. This has led, unsurprisingly, to acrimony. Larsson had been in a 32-year relationship with fellow anti-Nazi campaigner Eva Gabrielsson, but as they never married, she was not ...”

“... in ‘an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic trip’. Elective affinity was everything. As Williams said of Pound: ‘It took just one look and I knew it was it.’ Their relationship had a note of comedy in it: ‘He was impressed with his own poetry,’ Williams ...”

“... 31: He seems to me equal to the gods that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing – oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears ...”

“... the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality.’ There is frank talk of ‘preacherly drivel’ and a fine description of Queen Victoria as the ‘much-beloved though humourless dumpling of legend’. An American couple, surprised to find themselves hopelessly in love, are said to be ‘both so easily ridden in on by ...”

“... bourgeois or worse. It must have been rather as if Ivan Karamazov had suddenly materialised in the close at Barchester. No doubt Wittgenstein’s father, Karl, an Austrian steel magnate, bore some responsibility for the relentless soul-searching, the sense of sin and the pervasive unhappiness that beset his youngest son – and indeed nearly all his sons, for ...”

“... day, he remembers something he didn’t actually get to see: the ground is ‘where I once missed Frank Woolley just out when I arrived having made something like 70 in half an hour’. Others send birthday greetings, only to be trumped by the recipient: ‘The day doesn’t bother me. Just another. No better no worse. But the avalanche is appalling.’ Or ...”