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“... also requested by Gary Glitter (currently serving sixteen years as a convicted paedophile); Ronnie Scott (who asked for a Faye Dunaway doll, though Plomley persuaded him to take a saxophone instead); and the actor and explorer Duncan Carse, who asked for a ‘rubber woman’. Strangely, the BBC website says he asked for a ‘pin-up picture’. Glitter’s ...”

“... Eventually, Olive eloped with one of his business associates, leaving her two sons, David and Tony, then five and seven, sleeping upstairs. After her departure, Ronnie sometimes intimated that she was ill; at others that she had fallen into immoral ways. (‘Never judge, son. That’s God’s job, not ours.’) The two abandoned boys were left ...”

“... as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, Iraq is much less of a threat now than it was in 1991. Tony Blair and George W. Bush do not want us to think like this. Khidhir Hamza is the source of many of the headlines claiming that Iraq is on the verge of (or already has) a nuclear weapon capability. The Guardian reported on 1 August that Iraq would have ...”

“... seem in some ways more Anglocentric than he was. The Golden Treasury includes as many poems by Scott as by Keats, and more than 10 per cent of the poets it includes are Scottish. Though it contains few Victorian writers, the anthology certainly indicates aspects of Victorian taste: oodles of Robert Herrick, but only one poem attributed to John Donne; seven ...”

“... long predates the internet, as does the mentality and culture of fandom (he notes that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a fanatical supporter of the Princeton football team, to a point where he would call the coach to offer tactical advice, some of which may even have inspired a new tactic known as the ‘two-platoon system’ in the 1930s). But the internet ...”

“... months before the invasion, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, reported in a secret memo to Tony Blair that he was told in Washington that the US was going to ‘remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD’. However, because ‘the case was thin, Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD ...”

“... station, bearing leaflets, carrying messages as proudly as the freshly baked loaves in Ridley Scott’s celebrated commercial, shot in 1973, on the picturesque slopes of Shaftesbury. Carl Barlow, the youth who featured in the advertisement, underscored by the slow movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9, arranged for brass, went on to become a fireman in ...”

“... I drive back up the coast with Roy and Aisling: as we pass through Ballyshannon we remember that Tony Blair’s mother came from this little coastal town, which is the birthplace of the poet William Allingham, who was a friend of Tennyson and whose litanies of place-names and sense of natural magic and landscape influenced Yeats. The future British Prime ...”

“... affiliations. Many poems in this new collection are tokens of affection, offerings to friends – Tony White, Mary Ure, a dying poet. A few are more public, like the rather unquestioning poem about the Long Kesh hunger-strikers. There is a weirdly memorable poem about a poisoned goat. Fifty sonnets are about buildings, and the price of them: Nelson’s ...”

“... Berling, a lavish costume drama adapted from the novel by Selma Lagerlöf, the Swedish Walter Scott. The film’s success broadened Stiller’s ambitions, and he took Garbo with him to Berlin in search of more lucrative and prestigious contracts for them both. Meanwhile, Garbo’s performance in Gösta Berling caught the attention of G.W. Pabst, who cast ...”

“... superiority to Trimalchio. This ‘Whiggish’ judgment has many adherents, among them the late Tony Tanner, in an essay on Gatsby in The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo. For Tanner, perhaps the most distinguished of British ‘Americanists’, Fitzgerald’s revisions are ‘almost uncannily sure-handed, almost ...”

“... published until 1944) and made friends with David Archer, the publisher and bookseller whose Scott Street Arts Centre in Glasgow was a venue for the avant-garde of the interwar years. Graham met Dylan Thomas there, who was sufficiently impressed to include a Graham poem at the end of one of his own readings. Thomas was respectful, friendly and offered ...”

“... are the last people to believe those myths. In Scarface, Elvira Hancock (Michelle Pfeiffer) tells Tony Montana (Al Pacino) not to get high on his own supply. Cataclysms like Brexit, and politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, are what happens when an entire country gets high on its own supply, but everyone else stopped buying long ago. I was in ...”

“... on the US Amazon bestseller list, but the true-life Donald J. Trump story has more to do with what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘foul dust’ than with ideas or ideology. Reckoning with Trump means descending into the place that made him. What he represents, above all, is the triumph of an underworld of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians and ...”

“... Ernö Goldfinger or the LCC’s Architects’ Department, but also that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased with ...”