“... with more than the usual leavening of colonial Frenchness’. Then, shouldering a handbag ‘of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay’, she steels herself for a mind-blowing trip to the pullulating ‘logo-maze’ of Harvey Nichols. Cayce – pronounced ‘Case’, not ‘Casey’ – is a spectacularly talented, unerringly prescient branding ...”

“... a friend sneaked me into the Unprofor headquarters in a villa in the centre of town. General Michael Rose was away in Pale, we were told, negotiating with the Serbs. We were shown into a bedroom, now used as Rose’s private office. A Royal Marine sat back in the general’s chair, feet on the desk, his head hidden behind a thick book. The book was ...”

“... a second-hand copy of V.R. Lang: Poems & Plays, with a Memoir by Alison Lurie. The cover sports a black and white photograph of Lang looking soulful in a harlequin costume – a picture presumably taken during one of her performances for the Poets’ Theatre of Cambridge.Lurie’s memoir recreates the fervent excitement around the activities of this ...”

“... stood on the site of the vegetable garden (or orto) of an eighth-century monastery dedicated to St Michael, so it was nicknamed Or-san-michele. In the centuries since, it has been transformed from market to church to museum. Its latest incarnation, the newly restored Museo Orsanmichele, considers the artistic and architectural innovations of each successive ...”

“... as one would expect from his 1970 admiration of Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage, with its black and white photography and its old-fashioned use of the shrinking iris to close a scene by picking out a detail: ‘The serious way in which circle-outs centre one’s vision on a detail of the image is also a kind of affection towards its objects, in stark ...”

“... dark age. ‘Permissive’ and ‘alternative’ remain the dirtiest words in his lexicon; his black beast is dressed in soiled denim, ornamented with hand-crafted jewellery, has long, unkempt hair, chants ‘we shall overcome,’ or ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’ and trails a ‘sickly haze of pot smoke’. The fact that hippies ...”

“... the social ladder. ‘The West India interest was not just a handful of planters and merchants,’ Michael Taylor writes in the final paragraph of his excellent new book, The Interest, but involved ‘hundreds of MPs, peers, civil servants, businessmen, financiers, landowners, clergymen, intellectuals, journalists, publishers, sailors, soldiers and judges, and ...”

“... cables made their work look rather exciting. One junior attaché was disgruntled by ‘no-neck, black-leather-clad bodyguards’ in Sofia tearing up the streets in black 4x4s. A US embassy report on a Ukrainian presidential election noted that in preparation for the vote, ‘the idea of disappearing ink occurred to both ...”

“... and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen ...”

“... the contrast between Aldrin in his white spacesuit and the empty grey desert he stands on – the black of space beyond, the sun out of sight – that while it is, obviously, a photograph of a man on the moon it is also a picture of the living and the dead. For Armstrong, who always saw things from an engineer’s point of view, what was important was the ...”

“... that the ‘anarchists’ have hijacked legitimate protest, but that is not historically true: the Black Bloc were there to greet Reagan when he came to Europe in the 1980s, long before many of the other groups represented at Genoa were formed. The Tute Bianche (‘white overalls’) are a more recent and distinctively Post-Modern phenomenon, committed to the ...”

“... humour, neither of them from the narrator’s point of view. The image of the acrobats is from Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, and isn’t, on its first mention in that book, a dream: ‘The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling from each other’s ...”

“... a lock-in after hours, and we’re not home till three that morning. The phone goes early. It’s Michael Keohane, ringing from Sligo, where he’s president of the Yeats Society. We talk, more about the Middle East than Yeats, and he invites us to the opening of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo that Sunday, and to the party afterwards in Lissadell ...”

“... the film, too), imagines as a reality what for his wife was only a thought. He sees it in black and white, as if it was a steamy, pre-homicide sequence in a film noir. And finally – this may be just another way of stating the previous argument – words are for Kubrick part of the texture of a film, a feature of its sound system as much as a means ...”

“... the enviably beautiful Rose’s parentage and of her clandestine marriage to the Earl on the same black day, endeavours to pressure her favourite into renouncing his bride. All this, once we have swallowed Sophia Lee, is predictable enough (though conflating Mary’s execution with the fortunes of Essex is an original touch: the Queen of Scots is still alive ...”