“... And with the cinema too music is often the most powerful stimulant: I watched The Diary of Anne Frank for a time without tears until the arrival of some soupy music left me with two sodden handkerchiefs. So I am manifestly one of a host in whom tears are a cheap commodity. It always surprises me, therefore, when intelligent people talk with ...”

“... suicidal depression, he wrote dozens of letters – sometimes twenty or thirty a day – to his close friends and family, until some relief arrived in the form of an early encounter with psychoanalysis. Lewis suggests that analysis filled the vacuum that Christian Science had left – as a belief system that offered explanation and comfort. Certainly he ...”

“... him for some time then came up behind him and said: ‘I’ve had my eye on you. You get too close to the pictures.’ Sir Denis went to the Director and complimented him on the vigilance of his staff.25 March, Yorkshire. Everybody else seems to have seen the comet, but though I’ve been up on the roof several times searching the Northern sky like ...”

“... how to read the poems. One anecdote that Parker does not pass on to us concerns a meeting with Frank Harris, in which Housman took offence at Harris’s suggestion that the final stanza of ‘1887’, the introductory poem of A Shropshire Lad, was darkly intended. The poem remembers the Silver Jubilee celebrations, and Housman tests an ossified ...”

“... or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for a sulky, half-Catholic male adolescent. But Baudelaire the poet ...”

“... a spy network, a nest of Freemasons whose emblem was not an apron but the old school tie, quick to close ranks if one of its members came under suspicion, a conspiracy against the decent sort of England that Beaverbrook stood for, determined not to permit the cleansing transatlantic wind of the kind McCarthy unleashed in Washington to blow through the ...”

“... sorcery I do. Being damned, I am amused to see the centre of love diffused ... That, with its frank recognition of relish, helps to explain how, in present-day war, a nice boy like Nikolai Rostov can be killed. There’s an impressive poem by R.N. Currey which begins, ‘This is a damned inhuman sort of war’ – a longer, more diffuse but more ...”

“... as a language of diffusion, inattention, that he inhabits like Daffy Duck in Hollywood. His friend Frank O’Hara once grumbled that Ashbery was ‘always marrying the whole world’; charmingly, the poem ‘Houseboat Days’ itself admits that ‘The mind/Is so hospitable, taking in everything/Like boarders.’ Hence my reference to Hollywood, the chaotic ...”

“... of intent. Best Value. Whatever turns you on, the Lea Valley has got it. A media-friendly zone (close to Docklands). A recreation zone for Essex Man (easy access to the M25). An eco-zone for butterflies, deer, asylum-seeking birds. The nice thing about no-go, Official-Secrets-Act government establishments is that they are very good for wildlife. Thick ...”

“... might paint only the head and hands of his portraits, while assistants managed the rest. This is close to the division of labour between the early master cinematic animators, who drew key positions in a sequence, and the ‘in-betweeners’ who drew the intervening frames; but it still doesn’t really represent what Disney did. (Though in published ...”

“... acknowledged a legal right to privacy. The German basic law, like the US constitution, contains no frank privacy right, but where American courts have let their common law privacy rights wilt in the shadow of the First Amendment, German courts have extracted from the constitutional protection of individual integrity a qualified right (somewhat overqualified in ...”

“... that ‘as scholars, we should not seek knowledge for its own sake.’ Since this comes as close as can be imagined to what you might think is impermissible academic ‘hate speech’, it was noteworthy that it passed practically without comment. In the UK, the Education Secretary, already on record as saying that he regards the idea of education for ...”

“... primal scream (Spain 1982); Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ leap over Peter Shilton (Mexico 1986); Frank Rijkaard’s fleck of gob caught mid-parabola towards Rudi Völler’s perm, and Gazza’s tears, and Maradona’s tears (Italy 1990); Roberto Baggio’s penalty soaring over the bar (USA 1994); Zinedine Zidane walking past the trophy, head bowed, having ...”

“... with in-jokes. But in her journal, she documented her disappointment at not being accepted for Frank O’Connor’s writing seminar at Harvard as it leaked into every area of her life, and into her sentences, which flicker between the first and second person:You looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being ...”

“... and compulsory purchase legislation is archaic and complex,’ says a leaflet produced by Knight Frank, the property consultancy on the scheme. Unfathomable would be a better way of putting it. In France, the state buys homes at full market price in a band of 150 metres on either side of land affected by a scheme of national importance, but in the UK only ...”