“... may be thought to have gone out of him once it became obvious that he was not going to die young. Wells’s most famous imaginative device, the time machine, is relevant to this, since the Time Traveller is in effect cheating death by voyaging forward in another dimension. Did Wells himself make some such jump into hyperdrive, becoming a prophet of the ...”

“... called them, antagonised every influential social group: the military, writers and artists, young people, industrial workers, the bureaucrats in the ministries, the Party apparatus – and finally, his own colleagues in the Presidium. So ended a period of greater hope and change than the Soviet Union had known since the 1920s. When Khrushchev was ...”

“... On 10 September 1949 Michael Perrin, one of the heads of the British Atomic Energy Programme, was woken up by an urgent telephone call asking him to come to the communications room at the US Embassy in London. There his opposite number in the Pentagon asked that an RAF plane be sent to the upper atmosphere to check radioactivity detected by the US Air Force that appeared to signal a Soviet atomic explosion ...”

“... preventable deaths. They are Antonio Bradley, Anibal Carrasquillo, Ricardo Cruciani, Albert Drye, Michael Lopez, Elijah Muhammed, Michael Nieves, Mary Yehudah and Tarz Youngblood. The name ‘Rikers Island’ conjures a monolithic structure, but there are ten correctional facilities on the island, seven of which are ...”

“... of falsifying business records concerning funds channelled by Trump, via his former consigliere Michael Cohen, to the porn actress Stormy Daniels to buy her silence about sexual encounters with him. But evidence of the Trump Organisation’s dodgy finances has been accumulating for years. Indeed, in a different suit in civil court, filed by the New York ...”

“... Stortford, the market town where Rhodes grew up and where his father served as vicar of St Michael’s Church. Storey, whose grip on Victorian society is a little weak, sees Rhodes as insecure about his status. He was in fact proud to belong to the middling thrusters who amassed capital, joined professions and garrisoned the expansion of the British ...”

“... pole to the other. I find both descriptions – and conditions – alarming. In 1899, as a very young man, he wrote to an editor:I realise … that this novella, as with most of my pieces, is slapdash and over-hasty, but … I find that when the last word is written I can make no more corrections, in fact I do not even check through for spelling and ...”

“... influences was regularly exposed as untenable. Marlowe’s Edward II, for example, shows how the Young Mortimer – who in the name of the ancient constitution rids Edward’s court of Piers Gaveston and then of his pampered successors, the Spencers – inevitably goes on to rid it of the king too. (Once made protector, however, Mortimer abuses the same ...”

“... opulent weddings are now the main business of St Giles House – and entrusted us to an eager young assistant, headhunted a year earlier from ‘the best eco-hotel in Bournemouth’, who took us to the surviving 1750s grotto in what he described as ‘a golf buggy on steroids’. Before doing so, however, with considerable if hushed fanfare, he produced a ...”

“... mesmerised by a poster on my uncle’s wall.The black-tinted sunglasses, Jamaican dreads:  young Stevie Wonder sitting beside the  smiling Bob Marley, looking like two sides  of a DJ’s vinyl, something to be sampled, cut,  and sold like substances I’m not wise to yet.Stevie Wonder and Bob Marley don’t make the same kind of music: their meeting ...”

“... Hope’ (1986) ‘Naked’ (1988) ‘Balloon Dog’ (1994-2000) ‘Bear and Policeman’ (1998) ‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles’ (1988)PreviousNext Koons broke through in the early 1980s with a series titled ‘The New’ consisting of store-bought vacuum cleaners and other pristine appliances; set on or placed inside fluorescent light boxes, each immaculate ...”

“... if you don’t really want it, but Spender protested too much. In 1994 he wrote a letter to the young Alan Hollinghurst after receiving a copy of his second novel, The Folding Star. The letter shows a man in a state of confusion or unhappiness about the choices he has made. Dear Mr Hollinghurst Thank you very much for asking your publisher to send me ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... If the reader prefers a sober consideration of these issues, he should read Darwin Defended by Michael Ruse, a professor of the history and philosophy of biology. We can now move to a section of the library which could be called ‘The Descent of Authors who write on the Descent of Man’. Ms Elaine Morgan is a fe-fi-fo-fuminist who writes books on the ...”

“... two pages devoted to its royal house, which is rather modest considering that His Majesty King Michael I of Romania serves as Chairman of the Comité de Patronage of the Société des Amis de I’Almanach de Gotha 1998. From these pages I learn that Michael or Mihai was born to King Carol in 1921 and ...”