“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. For Pater, physical lust and spiritual ambition are opposites. The other exception is Kate Moss. Consider ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Fay Weldon’s autobiography. Early on, angels appear to her mother in the local park; a woman in white sits on the six-year-old Weldon’s bed; and ghosts unaccountably darken the rooms at her New Zealand high school (a sort of advance haunting, she now thinks, by the woman who was to be killed nearby in the murder dramatised in the film Heavenly ...”

“... language in which it is expressed had changed. You need to go back to contemporary texts, as Peter White did in his excellent Promised Verse (1993). The exact relationship of Horace, Maecenas and Augustus is quite tricky enough without having to read the details through a distorting lens. It might be worth adding that what are normally called the Odes and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... teeter between the two: a dead bee goes round and round in the coffee the boy has stirred; a white slug is frozen on a wall; a black carafe of wine stands on the table ‘like an axis’ around which the grown-ups are laughing and talking. Repetition and variation have their narrative counterpart, too – and The Question of Bruno isn’t so much a ...”