“... furnishings catalogued (McCarthy’s New York apartment in 1933 was ‘painted apricot with white trim, with good closet space, elevator boys and a doorman, Hepplewhite chairs . . . and English ivy in white cachepots from Macy’s’). Indeed almost everything about these ‘epic intellectuals’ interests ...”

“... the concordat that would guarantee continued single-family rule. The interpreter was Colonel William Eddy, a senior US intelligence officer and much else besides. Considered too insecure during the ‘global war on terror’, Suez was rejected as a potential venue for the re-enactment: the grandsons of the two principals and Eddy’s nephew had to make ...”

“... but to use their theories to leave the world a better place than they found it. Their leader is William MacAskill, a 28-year-old lecturer at Oxford. As graduate students MacAskill and his friend Toby Ord committed themselves to donate most of their future earnings to charity (in MacAskill’s case anything above £20,000, in Ord’s £18,000), and set ...”

“... had no source but Beer it had to be discarded. Out went an early love interest, Helen Trent, whose white arms were ‘the most beautiful … I ever saw’. Out went Crane’s dismissal of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata – ‘an old maid’s picnic’ so boring, Crane said (maybe), that he couldn’t finish it. Out went several significant details in a story ...”

“... that eventually led to current, commonly held tenets about the attentions fitting to a corpse. William Price, d.1893, was an arch druid in Wales, a surgeon, a Chartist, a vegetarian, a philoprogenetive advocate of free love, who called his child, born in his late years, Jesu Grist (sic). When the baby died, he tried to burn him on a pyre, according to ...”

“... for authority. Ginsberg often claims to have issued indirectly from Whitman’s and directly from William Carlos Williams’s overcoat: but Williams’s presence of mind in language is quite different from Ginsberg’s, and his poems are far more fully composed. Most of Ginsberg’s poems document his time and collapse into it. They haven’t survived the ...”

“... the sort of charity-show swagger that mugs you with its understated discretion. Brilliant white collars, sharp enough to chop onions. Exuberant manacles of cuff. Silk ties forcibly repressed into knuckle sized knots. Ferociously bulled black shoes to mirror the action, dizzy from stomping on rib cages, hacking at kidneys, leaving hoofprints of polish ...”

“... and the slick specs that were the signature of the poet’s transit through the noise of the white world: ‘For Edward Dorn, his brilliant luminous shade.’ The after-image flares and burns like the night the atom-bomb test in the Nevada desert overwhelmed the insolent rococo of the neon waterfalls of Las Vegas. Edward Dorn by Philip Behymer Dorn ...”

“... apotheosis which is awaiting it upon the cinema screen. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and William Peter Blatty’s Legion (‘The sequel to The Exorcist’) very neatly illustrate this parting of the ways. If Susan Hill’s ‘ghost story’ is not a pastiche, it is undoubtedly an essay in recreating the almost exhausted genre. We are back in that ...”

“... I’m shattered by the impact of re-entry.) A news flash. In the latest by-election The Liberal William Pitt has won the seat. His personal appeal defies detection. At previous attempts he met defeat. Clearly it is the SDP connection Which has supplied the upsurge of white heat That melts the Tory vote to a minority And ...”

“... of the Slave Trade' by Isaac Cruikshank (1792) Cruikshank based his drawing on a story told by William Wilberforce in a speech delivered in the House of Commons a week earlier, in April 1792, at the apogee of the campaign to ban the British slave trade. But while many in the country had spoken in favour of abolition – the Commons had received 519 ...”

“... with what Rory McEntegart has told us about the Articles’ gestation. What transmogrified a White Paper intended to accommodate the Lutherans into something like the opposite was that in August 1539 Cranmer was tied up in negotiations with the Germans at Lambeth while Henry was in thrall to Bishop Cuthbert Tunstal. Bernard calls the destruction of ...”

“... drop-in shows in ways I could never have predicted. The rarely seen Vulcano, a film directed by William Dieterle in a Hollywood version of Italian neo-realism, achieved a lively, sell-out crowd, many of whom were around my own age and some of whom lived on the barren volcanic island invaded by the original film crew. Folk memories of the Roman diva Anna ...”

“... acting, clearly liked ‘this nameless mode of naming the unnameable’. She told Hunt that William Godwin, her father, had brought out a new two-volume edition of the novel on the strength of the interest generated by the dramatisation. Three more stage versions of Frankenstein had opened by early September, including the burlesque Humgumption; or Dr ...”

“... the sort-of-autobiography Roland Barthes published in 1977, of ‘the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or form’; except that Nelson’s Argo is not a ship or (as for Barthes) a workload, but a family unit, a home. A ...”