“... depended on who was being asked, how they were being asked, and when. In 1941, Muddy Waters told Alan Lomax he’d never met Johnson. By the 1970s, Waters was saying: ‘I did get to see Robert play a few times.’ Two of the better books written about him, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found by Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch (2003), and Escaping the ...”

“... dash and authenticity. Here was a flagrant example of a regime of steel helmets and dark glasses, riding like a juggernaut over the wreckage of the unions, the universities and the free press. Many brilliant Chilean exiles found refuge in Britain, and many of them could recite poems and play musical instruments. Joan Jara, the English-born widow of the ...”

“... Klein Man v. Ralph Lauren Man. The lengthy feature quoted experts from the menswear designer Alan Flusser to the fashion historian Anne Hollander, who noted that ‘Bush looking casual on his ranch appears as if he’s the master of untold acres … It looks as if he owns Texas rather than governs it.’ Gore’s efforts to look relaxed were mocked by ...”

“... from the Islamic magical tradition are books of djinn – such as the ‘Red King’, depicted riding a lion and called on to protect the home from snakes – and works of astrology: in the Kitāb al-Bulhān (‘Book of Surprises’), the ‘angels of the seven heavens’ are represented by curious human-animal-plant hybrids. Belief in a multitude of ...”

“... graphic novels simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’. Moore and Satrapi, in common with many others, want their work to be ...”

“... fought over dead emperor’s bloodstained sheets.Rasputin comes hot on the heels of Napoleon, Alan Turing chases Rasputin. So much loosely connected information clogs the mind rather than opening it up. There’s a passage in Alasdair Gray’s novel 1982, Janine where the word ‘poison’ begins to overwhelm the text: ‘Today the Prime Poisoner declared ...”

“... was partly because of his quite deliberate scene-stealing manoeuvres. Robert Alda, the father of Alan, acted with Lorre in a horror film which has since become a cult called The Beast with Five Fingers. You ‘had to be prepared’ for his ‘little tricks’ all the time, Alda claimed. When other actors had turned away, you could safely assume they were out ...”

“... by the prospect of ‘streets paved with Goldwyn’. Newly married again, to the writer and actor Alan Campbell, she moved to Hollywood in 1934 and worked there, on and off, for almost thirty years. While she endlessly complained about the way writers were treated on the ‘Isle of Do-What’s-Done-Before’, she took her work seriously. ‘No matter what the ...”

“... Endgame, with Jack MacGowran as Clov. Beckett was delighted by Magee’s performance. He wrote to Alan Schneider: ‘I want to tell you about Krapp in London … I am extremely pleased with the result and find it hard to imagine a better performance than that given by Magee both in his recording and his stage performance.’ It was during that production that ...”

“... with the ramifications of crisis, and a literary novel had to hedge its bets. The first chapter of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library contains a carefully managed piece of future-proofing: ‘My life was in a strange way that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to be. I was riding high on sex and ...”

“... on my pony’ at Osborne House. In Balmoral in 1860 or Death of the Royal Stag with the Queen Riding up to Congratulate His Royal Highness, Albert is the hero, standing tall after killing a ‘royal’ stag (one with twelve points on its antlers), his rifle slung over his shoulder. From an elevated and distant position the queen looks down ...”

“... valley where is made no friend,The old gang to be forgotten in the spring,The hard bitch and the riding-master,Stiff underground; deep in a clear lake,The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there.And the second from Bucolics in 1952, in which, having admitted that ‘A haunted lake is sick,’ he quickly moves on:But that’s not going to stop me wondering what ...”

“... It’s worth taking a moment to wonder if that would matter. At the moment, to borrow the analysis Alan Rusbridger offered in a long blog post, the media landscape is divided into three main players. 1. The press. 2. The big public broadcasters. 3. The new media, which are lively, chaotic, decentralised, prone to fads and crazes, and are opening up access to ...”

“... hard to imagine anything less engaging or novelistic, but the vitality of the whole, the sense of Alan Bennett characters filled with Old Testament fervour, was strong enough to blot it out. Towards the end of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit the narrator wonders what would have happened if she had stayed in the church. She decides she would have been a priest ...”

“... also talked about Fisher’s ideas for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in ...”