“... barrelling through fences and running over people’s feet: ‘I would drive … real fast and close by the fans and yell obscenities at them. “Fuck you! Fucker!” They’d just sit there and smile and wave.’When Elvis shows up at Lisa Marie’s school in LA for a parent-teacher evening, the swagger is unmistakable:I knew he was coming, and I ...”

“... alarming queer by showing him to be melancholy, haunted, as solitary as he was social, with many close friendships and a few intense, complex relationships with lovers. And an artist who was exacting and ambitious and uncompromising. Perhaps the most affecting sentence in this book is the last: ‘In the morning, work.’Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in ...”

“... 19th-century illustrations of the disastrous possibilities that could befall a whaling boat at close quarters with a whale. In the best of them, the overriding sense is of physical disproportion, as if the boats and the men belong in the background of the composition but have unaccountably crept forward, becoming minuscule beside this or that part of their ...”

“... sea, which was then many days distant, but even drew the line at going to see the River Magdalena, close enough for someone of even the feeblest geographical curiosity. Under the waving palm-trees Nuñez read the Nineteenth Century, the Economist, the Revue des Deux Mondes and that sort of thing (he was an early enthusiast for Freud’s paper on ...”

“... any given age, according to whether the ‘sign’ and the ‘thing’ are perceived as distant, close, contained within each other, excluded from each other, parodying each other, and so on. And there will be a trope for each. But all these tropes, for Foucault himself, are part of a vast historical catachresis, a bacchanal of misnaming, a naivety without ...”

“... refinements, as Ginzburg and Mulisch know: they place the tragedies they imagine tantalisingly close to the end of the war. Shortly after Cenzo Rena and the hostages are executed, the British arrive in San Costanzo. Anton Steenwijk’s family is destroyed when ‘almost all of Europe had been liberated and was rejoicing, eating, drinking, making love, and ...”

“... of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em on Sheppey in 1975, the year after Johnson arrived. In the episode Frank Spencer takes his driving test for the tenth time, and hundreds of locals stood on the beach to watch Crawford, who was known for doing his own stunts, drive a blue Hillman Imp off Sheerness jetty. Crawford is Sheppey showbiz royalty: his mother, Doris ...”

“... of the Walsungs’, which culminates in a giddy Wagnerian scene of sibling incest, proved much too close to the bone for his outraged father-in-law. Later, Arnold Schoenberg was startled to find in Doctor Faustus a composer in league with the devil whose fame depended chiefly on inventing the twelve-tone system. A presentation copy from Mann inscribed ‘For ...”

“... lasted because they have psychological depth. Two other front-rank directors who favoured him were Frank Capra and John Ford: Capra served Stewart extremely well and was more than reciprocally rewarded three times, in You Can’t Take It with You, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Ford called on him for a pair of late films. In Two Rode ...”

“... end, his affection for his friend Arnaud, to whom he recommends the shirtmaker – the circle does close. Asked by Edward Hirsch, who interviewed him for the Paris Review, how he ‘hit upon’ his ‘distinctive, beautiful and implacable’ prose style, Salter answered tersely, almost evasively: ‘I like to write. I’m moved by writing. One can’t analyse ...”

“... him is power relations, policy struggles, and the competing claims on the nation. Bew pays close attention to the preoccupation of many Victorian intellectuals with Ireland, and deals with the ideas of Mill and others without falling into the jejeune generalisations of post-colonial critique. He presents, among other specimens, an unfamiliar James ...”

“... and b) deficient in what US higher education considers written English facility’. It is as frank and, at the same time, as delicately worded an attempt at ‘presenting himself as an advocate of SWE’s utility rather than as a prophet of its innate superiority’ as possible. Nonetheless, and not surprisingly, a number of students on the receiving end ...”

“... her lover (and Bryher’s then husband) Kenneth Macpherson, led to her involvement in the journal Close Up, and in 1930 she acted alongside Paul Robeson in the film Borderline. Her traumatic experience of pregnancy and childbirth, which Hollenberg explored sensitively in H.D.: The Poetics of Childbirth and Creativity (1991), also had a generative effect on ...”

“... was Amílcar Cabral, who led Guinea-Bissau’s revolt against Portuguese colonialism. He was a close ally of Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana. A few weeks after the conference in Havana, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup. He had become an unpopular and authoritarian ruler, but there were rumours that the CIA had a hand in his downfall, unhappy ...”

“... the first female party leader in German history. Kohl never forgave her. ‘I brought my assassin close to me,’ he later recalled, overlooking the gross errors of judgment by which he had precipitated his downfall. ‘I put the snake on my own arm.’ Leading the charge against Kohl was a high-risk enterprise. It could have gone horribly wrong. But ...”