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“... can’t bear to listen to the songs considered their most characteristic (‘Heroin’, ‘Sister Ray’). With a decidedly slim catalogue (four studio albums) but an outsized posthumous reputation, they are not an easy act to place in the history of popular music. Nor is it easy to identify the band as a unit, since members came and went. ‘The Velvet ...”

“... riddle of life is in the structure of proteins,’ he replied, ‘and it can be solved only by X-ray crystallography.’ The Great Sage was John Desmond Bernal, a flamboyant Irishman with a mane of fair hair, crumpled flannel trousers and a tweed jacket. We called him Sage, because he knew everything, from physics to the history of art. Knowledge poured from ...”

“... Story of a Man last time a man was sealed in skin like an inspoken word sealed in it was mid-spring, most people arm in arm, most trees whispering and he could just make out the fluttering light it was warm, it was days you walk out without a coat and little rain showers dash across the carpark and he stood there, like a man on film, going on with his heartwork at last at last he could think clearly this is myself, he said, rubbing round all four sides of my breeze-block patience this is one or two flying strands of my eyes this is my heart’s halo’s prismatic subdivisions there were people bringing chairs to the fire-escapes, peering down ...”

“... as many as nine. ‘Hello, I am H.L. Hunt,’ he would introduce himself. ‘I’m the richest man in the world.’ In the 1950s that wasn’t far from the truth, but because Hunt flew economy, parked his car five hundred yards away from his Dallas office to avoid parking meters and sent his children to state schools, you wouldn’t have guessed. After ...”

“... point of view, is worth the single frame of the murderer’s face as he watches a black man in a shower. His whole look goes glazed with wonder and baffled desire, sheds its mask of ordinariness. This is the sort of moment movies are for: we know the man through his yearning, see that he will never allow himself ...”

“... on the innocence of Caitlin, an American actress visiting her daughter in Honduras. She meets a man from the US embassy who speaks in the glib voice of imperialism: ‘We’re not just here because we go all gooey inside when we think about the relationship between free enterprise and democracy!’ She drives around the countryside in a jeep with a friend ...”

“... on the Innocks Estate in North Nibley; tiles were ripped from the bus shelter, and Councillor Ray Manning – hero of the moment – has removed a broken seat. I pick up a copy of the Gazette later on, and see there is more. A £300 Amaco mountain bike (‘with 21 gears, coloured purple and black’) was stolen from a garage at Clingre Farm, Stinchcombe ...”

“... air and come back down with different thighs, necks from other girls, a lean gold torso of Amber-Ray on a bubbling bottom half of Brooke. The mouths that cry GOOD HANDS GOOD HANDS. The arms he loves that make the basket, the body he loves that drops neat                                               into them. Oh ...”

“... body with all the expertise You might expect from someone who can view his own expenditure with X-ray eyes America, the all-seeing, radiographic power Pales our skeletons beneath its probity And there are elephants moving through the twilight Hauling gigantic cars through the Persian dusk And Hannibal is riding them up front – Great ears billow ...”

“... tune. The shouts of a sergeant-major wheel the regiment. What are the thoughts of a serving man? Tender? Insolent? Their black trousers are striped with gold. (iii) Here is the man in the stovepipe hat who is writing this poem. Surreptitiously, a pouch of verses round his neck, he has joined the procession astride a ...”

“... bone in his finger-tip was slowly softening to the consistency of toffee or old chewing gum. The X-ray in January had, apparently, looked normal. By the time a GP noticed that this finger business had been going on too long and referred him to the Surgical Assessment Unit at Ipswich A&E, it was the end of May. My brother called me and I drove him to the ...”

“... memory of it. Once, in gym class, he broke his collarbone. Seeing himself in the old-fashioned X-ray machine at the hospital, he had a kind of epiphany. In a memoir he would call it ‘the First Photogram in Motion I had ever seen’. The moving image of his own insides was something he was unable to sort into any of the usual categories. ‘There must be ...”

“... who loves books but can’t afford them, there are binbags full of novels; for a local Hungarian man who comes to Tuli fearing his wife will take away his right to see their child, there is legal aid. One by one, Tuli’s employees, fascinated by his charm and the directness of his methods, start imitating them. Nia shows a Georgian waitress at the Polish ...”

“... out of her ‘Select Bibliography’.) All three are, self-confessedly, dwarfed by the late Gordon Ray’s authoritative two-volume biography, Thackeray, The Uses of Adversity (1955) and Thackeray, The Age of Wisdom (1958). Not to labour the point, the story of Thackeray’s life (one of the great Victorian closed books) is no longer much of a mystery. Nor can ...”

“... Was Wittgenstein a spiritual as well as a philosophical genius? Ray Monk’s exceptionally fine and fat biography puts us in a better position to answer this question than we have been hitherto. Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand Wittgenstein’s character is with the photographs that exist of his face ...”