“... went to a trade-union dance with her friends from the Medical Institute. She wore a red dress and white slippers. She was asked to dance by an American – at first, she thought he might come from one of the Baltic countries – who called himself Alik. She liked him; he was very polite, sweet and reserved. He was well-dressed. She took him to meet her ...”

“... author also of Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and a biography of Cliff Richard – can’t be unaware of the implied contrast with the Paschal lamb of Exodus 12.46 and the fulfilment of the Scripture in the Gospel of John, chapter 19 (‘Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified ...”

“... hadn’t got into the black. In What It Takes (1992), a breathless work of campaign stenography, Richard Ben Cramer described the confession Biden made to his aides before deciding to run: ‘The debts – he went through his finances whole, the mortgages, the credit cards. He was into Visa, Amex for thousands.’The letter to his tenants appears in ...”

“... into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ...”

“... tired of being confused) assembles a mass of conflicting testimony about his author, the novelist Richard Shewin. His witnesses include a waspish brother, his wife, two spinsters of uncertain virtue, and (the finest comic role he was to create for radio) the 12-tone composeress Hilda Tablet. The success of A Very Great Man Indeed (1953) prompted six ...”

“... critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly ...”

“... travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental travel, rather than as a ...”

“... book about difficulty of access, about a public figure withholding himself, about compromise (the white of Tottenham for the ‘peculiar blue vest’ of Lazio). Hamilton is even able to reveal that ‘Gazza is a poet!’ The themes adumbrated above are all present in Walking Possession. It is an oddly but appropriately over-organised and compartmentalised ...”

“... or glossed over: her opposition to the October Revolution and her support for the monarchist White Army during the Civil War of 1918-22, for example, or her contempt for Lenin. Other facts of her life were simply unmentionable in the Soviet Union: her numerous love affairs with men and women during her marriage to Sergei Efron; her ridicule of the Soviet ...”

“... desperately inauthentic sensation. The State of the Union speech. The New Hampshire primary. The White House Easter egg roll. The presentation of the Presidential Thanksgiving turkey (which even comes complete with its own self-satirising pun). I would add the Nobel Prizes though not, oddly enough, the Booker ones. Nothing that has to be done every year ...”

“... till his arm ached, and then he flung him into a chair, gasping, cursing, and scarcely human. And Richard Chandos v. Boler, the Boche villain of Dornford Yates’s Cost Price:   ‘Look on your own face,’ I said; ‘for, by God, when you see it next, it won’t look the same.’   Then, as a man puts the weight, I put his face to the wall beside the ...”

“... does he think? He must have an opinion. If forced to side with either Mervyn Griffith-Jones or Richard Hoggart, which of them would he pick? However, Mr Sparrow has long since folded his tent and slipped away. That familiar sound of canvas being taken down is heard in many of his independent and controversial essays. ‘I do not suggest what the answer ...”

“... of the man stays stamped on his photographed features till the end – strongly marked in Richard Avedon’s famous portrait of 1969. Vera passes photographically through the book like royalty, always exuding grace, joy and beauty. Igor’s snapshot of her by a lake in Wiesbaden in 1930 is particularly fetching, with the remote glow of a legend. The ...”

“... films we see on TV as ET squiffily flicks from channel to channel is a clip (but why in black and white?) from This Island Earth, one of the most poetic and inventive of 1950s sci-fi movies, in which the desperation of the aliens and their finally sympathetic nature are something of a precedent for this film. It is no coincidence either that there is one from ...”

“... sweeping along any number of clichés, truisms and allusions in its wake, as when describing Richard Burton in Rich (1988): ‘He was driven by a devil that he never knew but he never stopped fighting, a maker of his own myths, Celtic, Faustian, an Icarus and a Don Juan, coming out from his beloved Wales like a mystical warrior to rove the world for ...”