“... by Ernest Bucalossi, in brackets ‘very animated’.Here is ‘The Mosquito’s Parade’ by Howard Whitney, ‘At the Temple Gates’ by Gatty Sellars, and sheets and sheets of Ivor Novello. Every Sunday night she thumps out these old standards on the Gilpin Place piano, with occasional updates, ‘Forgotten Dreams’ by Leroy Anderson, the theme from ...”

“... Law (1997); and Fox Nation v. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault on Truth by Mark Howard. I toss these books together to indicate how this digital age, which prides itself on its abundance and freedom of information, has become so uneasy about the pervasiveness of lying. We might add to these indictments three of Oborne’s earlier ...”

“... that got him the offer to come to Hollywood and make a picture for RKO. The Martian script was by Howard Koch, who would later work on Casablanca and The Letter, but everyone always knew that Welles’s contribution was central. He had advised Koch to employ the present tense and let the story unfold as a piece of live radio: it would leak out, a string of ...”

“... unexpected back gardens, flinging dazzling light into dim minds, Koestler’s career left scorch marks and illuminations across the 20th century. When it finally stopped and the flames died, the darkness suddenly seemed absolute. Now he is almost forgotten. Once, all students with a grain of discontent about their world read his books. Many of their ...”

“... parties that seized the San Nicolas, probably the first flag officer to do so since Sir Edward Howard in 1513.Just as he will have no truck with those who seek to diminish Drake, so Rodger deplores those modern British (though, oddly, not French) historians who try to write off Nelson’s greatest victory as ‘essentially marginal’. True, he ...”

“... Yul Brynner with dark wavy hair (Brynner was born in Vladivostok). Philby, more the tweedy Trevor Howard type, was also reckoned a handsome man. Their appeal to women, however, depended on more than looks. Their disabilities (Sorge’s limp and Philby’s pronounced stammer) made them vulnerable, which no doubt helped; above all, vitality, cheerfulness and ...”

“... up from – but I take up & knit up the ravelled ends. I had a sprained thumb, Ted bloody claw marks, for a week, and I remember hurling a glass with all my force across a dark room; instead of shattering the glass rebounded and remained intact: I got hit and saw stars – for the first time – blinding red & white stars exploding in the black void of ...”

“... her memoir of the years covered by these letters, Force of Circumstance (as translated by Richard Howard), and in Carol Cosman’s version of America Day by Day. The difference between Beloved Chicago Man and The Mandarins is that Beauvoir could speak to Algren as she could to no one else. Anyone reading these extraordinary communications will urgently want ...”

“... list of names in his diary, which is clearly a private catalogue of the like-minded, including Howard Sturgis, Housman, J.A. Symonds, Pater, the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question ...”

“... A citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and a generation younger than Blackhawk, Estes bears the marks of the political radicalisation brought by the 2008 financial crisis and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016-17, which attempted to block the construction of an oil pipeline traversing the Standing Rock Reservation. In Our History Is the ...”

“... through the Harlem YMCA on his first morning he bumped into Alain Locke, the head of philosophy at Howard University and author of The New Negro, whom he had met at Tuskegee a few months earlier. Locke was talking to the poet Langston Hughes, and after Locke left, the pair discussed poetry, criticism and politics. Handing Ellison a parcel containing two novels ...”

“... manifest benignly in elderly men from the Mediterranean, which burrowed from the outside in: from marks on the skin, to the stomach and lungs. Non-human illnesses: men dying from the blights of sheep, of birds, of cats, diseases no man had ever died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France ...”