“... grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the years (1925 and 1928 respectively) lie like little marble asps, waiting to keep their dates. Who knows what decided the cemetery authorities to advertise their prospective clients in this way? Elsewhere among the ...”

“... Australia. Ratih Hardjono, who works from Melbourne for Jakarta’s daily Kompas, led with John Howard’s win and the election-night speech in which he promised, hand on heart, a new commitment to Aboriginal reconciliation. Hardjono also wanted Indonesians to learn something about the democratic process from Australia: compulsory voting, the distribution ...”

“... was George Finch, who was supposed to lead one climbing party with the apparatus while Mallory and Howard Somervell went without it. Events conspired to prevent this happening, and the final party not only went without oxygen but made it impossible for Finch to assemble a qualified group to follow with it. Nonetheless, even with skeletal support Finch and ...”

“... as well as those like Lurie living in and around Cambridge. Older, established poets, such as Richard Wilbur and Richard Eberhart, added gravitas to the enterprise. ‘The emotional temperature of the Poets’ Theatre in the early days,’ Lurie writes, ‘was high, for most of the younger writers and their friends were ...”

“... along the way, not least raising money, though location was apparently a problem, too. As Richard Holmes, one of the producers and nothing so far as I know to do with the Romantic biographer, put it: ‘Imagine turning up to a little old lady’s house and asking if it would be OK to shoot dead babies in her home.’ Well quite. They got round that ...”

“... a.m. on 18 November 1975, and was in the form of a voluntary statement, as follows: ‘I Jeffrey Howard Archer do state that I took merchandise to the value of $540, the property of the Robert Simpson Company Ltd, on November 18 1975 without paying for same and without permission.’ The details of the aforesaid Jeffrey ...”

“... genre is heroic’ – meaning ‘Westerns, thrillers, sophisticated comedies’. Discussing Howard Hawks Scarface, he was agog at Boris Karloff’s death: He squats down to throw a ball in a game of ninepins and doesn’t get up; a rifle shot prostrates him. The camera follows the ball he’s thrown as it knocks down all the pins except One that keeps ...”

“... while much is known about such women as the Duchess of Portsmouth, Elizabeth Villiers, Henrietta Howard and the Countess of Warwick, no serious attempt has yet been made to write that alternative version of royal history which their lives and loves collectively constitute. In any such account, the life and love of Dora Jordan would occupy a place both ample ...”

“... plays directed by Max Stafford-Clark, or the plays of Christopher Hampton, Joe Orton, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Athol Fugard or Sam Shepard. The tradition of unmannered acting, devotion to the text, unostentatious direction, simple and expressive design has been maintained. So also, until recently, has the sectarian fervour with which the Royal Court has ...”

“... He is too busy – much too busy. He is a mouth worker. He has followed the example of expansive Richard Crossman, dictating a diary to a machine, instructing manual workers to type out the ever-rolling stream of consciousness. Between 1972 and 1980 Hall dictated more than a million words, he tells us, as source material for future historians. To John ...”

“... avant-garde – Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen – to which his contemporaries Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett were also drawn. The mecca for music students in those days was Stockhausen’s headquarters at Darmstadt, where the ‘Darmstadt Headbangers’, as Tom Lubbock describes them, treated Britten and Shostakovich with derision as ...”

“... a world as distant as possible from the one in which she was raised. Arbus’s brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, wrote that her ‘pictures are spectacular, shocking, dramatic and concentrate on subjects perverse and queer (freaks, professional transvestites, strong men, tattooed men, the children of the very rich)’. He and Diane were the children of ...”

“... this shift, occasionally making things worse. Just before our gathering, the zombie chieftain John Howard had delivered a refulgent message of thanks on TV, making it plain his new government would turn first to workplace legislation. The aim would be reform in the interest of small business – boosting enterprise by making hiring and firing much ...”

“... medium that it should precipitate this particular dual sense. The greatness of Gielgud’s Richard II is not a simultaneous sense of an off-stage Gielgud and an on-stage Richard, but the transparency or dissolving of the particular actor’s fringe contingencies, even if an impersonal actedness remains part of the ...”

“... who started moving in their own directions after the Sex Pistols showed the way. Debbie Juvenile, Richard Hell, Howard Devoto, Poly Styrene, Stiv Bator, Lucy Toothpaste, Mark P, Joe Strummer, Steve Severin, Siouxsie Sioux, Tom Verlaine, Jordan, Sue Catwoman, Berlin: names to conjure with. And names which hang round the neck ...”