“... he was the one with the camera. ‘Anyone could be in that suit,’ the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said of the picture of Aldrin. ‘It is a portrait of humanity evolving before our eyes into something new and extraordinary. It’s as if the moon’s surface has overwhelmed Aldrin’s face, or even become it.’ I’m not so sure: I see only Aldrin. That ...”

“... and a humbug he was never quite sure how serious he was intending to be. When the Irish rebel Roger Casement was about to go on trial for the capital crime of high treason for his part in the Easter Rising of 1916, Shaw wrote a speech for him to read out in court in his own defence. The intention was that Casement, as O’Toole writes, ‘would literally ...”

“... and useful work. The Song Index and Discography in his book are by other people (S.J. Estes and Roger Ford); Shelton himself prefers ersatz social history (‘The year 1960 was after Joe McCarthy, before Eugene McCarthy. After the beats, before the hippies. After the Old Left, before the New Left. After Campbell’s soup, before Andy Warhol …’) or ...”

“... from him of his arrangements in Hull – principally the depth of his involvements with Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan, walk-on grotesques as far as Amis was concerned – and can’t have been pleased by hints here and there of Larkin’s reservations about the Amis works and life. In Amis’s correspondence with Conquest, and more covertly in his Memoirs ...”

“... qualities of sense and sensibility the commemoratee would have relished. There is, for instance, Roger Lonsdale, presenting with due flourish a work by the painter and art theorist Jonathan Richardson the elder, and illuminating Richardson’s own little-known life (down to a new birth-year) as well as the career of his young friend Pope. Lonsdale never ...”

“... determined by personal feeling, and the more scholarly accounts of Robert Ackerman and Hugh Lloyd-Jones which located her ‘at the heart’ of the (so-called) Cambridge Ritualists. Reluctant to offer an alternative myth, yet anxious to avoid already trampled ground, Beard instead explores Harrison’s formative years in London, and asks, rather than ...”

“... of Parliament. A decade later, a coterie of young, untried artists including Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris set out to adorn the walls of the Oxford Union with similar subjects. But neither Dyce nor the high-spirited youths were qualified to paint in fresco, and the Oxford pictures decayed and disappeared even more rapidly than the ones at ...”

“... bear Iorek Byrnison. Lyra meets him in her journey north when she is trying to rescue her friend Roger from the General Oblation Board. Iorek’s ferocity and unshakeable instinct for what is true makes him morally terrifying in the way truly admirable creatures are: they make you a little afraid because there are no exceptions or exclusions, and you know ...”

“... meet in turn-of-the-century Berlin. Clive, prone to rashness and played with immense energy by Roger Livesey, is a version of Powell. Theo, reserved and considered, represents an idealised alter ego of Pressburger, who gave him the eloquence and insight Clive lacks. Taken prisoner in England during the First World War, Theo returns at the outbreak of the ...”

“... of mental sloth or moral vacuity,’ opined the anonymous author of the Telegraph obituary. Roger Scruton in his memorial service valedictory saw Fuller’s intellectual life as growth towards a maturity into which he had just entered, a movement towards the familiar shape of right thinking. This was not the Peter Fuller I knew and still miss ...”

“... ascendants of modern scientists. Building on the celestial hermeneutics of philosophers such as Roger Bacon, Renaissance magi, Catholic and Protestant alike, believed in the cosmic connectedness of everything from planetary motion to human health. Its imaginative reach was not so different from, say, the unified field theory of particle physicists. A magus ...”

“... surrogates and key supporters constituted a sort of misogyny army – or as Star Jones, the former host of the talk show the View put it, ‘Newt Gingrich, Giuliani and Chris Christie: they’ve got like the trifecta of misogyny.’ The army included Steve Bannon, who as head of the alt-right site Breitbart News hired Milo Yiannopoulos and ...”

“... He was banned for spearheading a campaign of racist abuse aimed at the actor Leslie Jones, who starred as the only black member of the all-woman team in the remake of Ghostbusters. Twitter’s former CEO, Dick Costolo, admitted that the company’s failure to combat bullying on its platform was part of the reason for the decline in the number of ...”

“... communist. I hadn’t known that this was McChrystal’s idea. He also told his officers to read Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare, a French counterinsurgency handbook designed for use in Algeria and famous for its advocacy of torture.McChrystal followed his memoir with three business self-help manuals, published at three-year intervals and copyrighted to ...”

“... those of the novelist E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady was the ancestor of Bridget Jones. There was a sense of relief at emerging into a world from which the constraints of the Edwardian age had been blown away. The loss of 880,000 men meant that many women would never marry, but they would have the vote and they would have unprecedented ...”