“... 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 ...”

“... Afterwards she resolved to accept her addiction and shed her old identity; she dyed her hair white-blonde, became Anna Kavan, a name which seemed fortuitously reminiscent of Kafka. ‘Why does the K sound in a name symbolise the struggle of those who try to make themselves at home on a homeless borderland?’ she wrote. Asylum Piece, her first book ...”

“... scandal, but it was acting in the national interest. Johnson’s real hero, however, is Richard Nixon, an embodiment of all that is best in the American character. By contrast, John Kennedy was a spoiled rich kid without principles or convictions, who thought he was above the law and ran around with glamorous women. Why, then, was Nixon’s ...”

“... thought they might well be viewed as links between mammals, birds and reptiles. His bête noire, Richard Owen, held fast to Platonisin, however, and denied that they were intermediate to anything – he placed the platypus with the edentates (armadillos, again). Owen even denied that Ornithorychus laid eggs, though British settlers and Aborigines said they ...”

“... mother’s dress that evening as ill-fitting and embarrassing: ‘narrow bodice’, ‘fold-over white satin boat neck’, ‘lots of bare skin’. The party is full of Katherine’s cronies, minor celebrities with a certain shabby glamour, all harbouring minor grudges. The next morning there is broken glass on the floor, which the maid cleans up ...”

“... but easily visible. The algae disappear and so do the bright colours, leaving the coral ghostly white – what’s known as coral bleaching. If the corals can’t regain their algae, they starve and die.A recent assessment of climate tipping points in Science designated low-latitude coral reefs one of the ecosystems most vulnerable to rising ...”