“... outside my window on purpose to freak me out’ – this, it transpired, was the silhouette of two black streetlights, one superimposed on the other. I spent two weeks adding 143 words to my novel, about peeing next to Rob Roy’s grave, feeling further from coherence with every draft. Local news graphics of the virion floated through the air, along with ...”

“... to Charlie Stavros, ultimately his most reliable friend, strikes up with crazy Jill and crazier black Skeeter and literally walks through fire. Rabbit is rich (1980) is the account of a Rabbit made comfortable when a long-reconciled Janice inherits her father Fred’s motor dealership, which he has enriched with a Toyota agency. Rabbit speculates, at the ...”

“... Clark, the tycoon James Goldsmith and the zoo-keeper John Aspinall arranged a dinner with Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph, to try to persuade him to order his (entirely independent) editor to stop backing Heseltine. Black refused, but we are left in no doubt that it is at dinner parties such as these that important ...”

“... Live rather than going to NBC’s Dateline), and misbehaving celebrities like Julia Roberts, Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson are their meat. On the evening in question, Primetime Live had managed to get hold of a recent O.J. girlfriend – a pretty, big-eyed, unbelievably stupid model – who insisted that she knew he was innocent.Innocence of some sort ...”

“... in courtrooms: a claim proved to be false within a matter of days. There was also a certain black comedy in the fact that the girl who had lied about being a lawyer should be attacked two days later, in the same papers, by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard professor of law, who happened to be visiting Australia. I met Jill Kitson on the morning his article ...”

“... the act of composition: brow furrowed, pencil poised, the poet sports a rust-red silk scarf over a black shirt and wears a large ring mounted with a chunky ruby. The painting is clumsy but it does express how seriously Hill takes himself and the stupefied awe his critics feel for him. One of Hill’s most notable champions is Christopher Ricks and we may ...”

“... become less and less answerable to their members. Taxation has become more progressive, but the black economy has flourished. The savage, unregulated market of the 19th century has been tamed, but it has become increasingly clear that the tamers themselves now need taming. The central discovery of the founding fathers of social democracy was that the ...”

“... outside the old Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street, walking down to the entrance of the big black palace, taking the lift up to the second floor, and bursting into the editor’s office just as the morning conference was about to begin. After explaining the circumstances to the astonished assembly, I intended to invite the editor to move over, plonk ...”

“... say. Then there is a white girl, who could be from anywhere between Moscow and San Francisco; a black boy, probably from Africa, possibly Birmingham; a Malay or Indonesian boy; another boy who I think is South American, but don’t hold me to it, he could be an Arab; and a girl I can say with assurance is one of a billion or so Chinese. All have charming ...”

“... which turn a wide cast of villains, friends and villain-friends into so many undifferentiated black marks. But his collective observations of his jailers – especially the prison’s racial dynamics, with white guards dominating their black colleagues, and a Puerto Rican contingent showing the most sympathy to the ...”

“... the region the Greeks called Scythia, the vast steppe lands to the north and east of the Black Sea. Herodotus shows the Amazons acting peaceably, even amorously in a sexual rendezvous with neighbouring Scythians, but he also mentions a Scythian name for the tribe that suggests a darker side: Oiorpata or ‘man-killers’. The notion of female power ...”

“... read of the king being served spam. Of course, there were some inequalities, and an enterprising black market (Private Walker in Dad’s Army); and I still remember (or think I do) the farmers in Staffordshire who grudgingly took me and my mother in as evacuees towards the end of the war feasting on lovely fresh brown eggs while we had to make do with our ...”

“... up years ago – and because of it too: the pace of change has picked up since then. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sometimes talks about the importance of tourism to New York as if tourists were more important to the city than its inhabitants, but when you consider that 44 million tourists visited the city last year – an increase of 25 per cent since 2001 ...”

“... original bodies remain: one fossil recovered from north-eastern Russia was coated with a thin black layer less than a thousandth of a millimetre thick. In 2018, scientists used mass spectrometry to analyse the layer, revealing the carbon skeletons of cholesterol-like molecules. If these conclusions are correct, Dickinsonia would count among the earliest ...”

“... of the opposition was in hiding, in exile or dead. He was greeted at the hotel by crowds of angry black-shirted squadristi – armed fascist squads – who threatened him and smashed windows, demanding that he leave town. He was lulled into accepting the ‘protection’ of a local fascist leader, Carlo Scorza, but after being driven away he was viciously ...”