“... candidates for the roles of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, Tristan and Isolde, or Elektra: but now, as James Levine, the artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has notoriously complained, it is very hard to assemble a cast even for Aida. Nobody quite knows why this should be so: it could be the fault of teaching, it could be the merest freak of ...”

“... Cassell’s Magazine in 1898. And the lead role has attracted all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination ...”

“... In ‘The Black Dog’, it’s clear that the tempestuous Orianda will never marry the temperate Gerald but he’s unable to see it. In ‘The Handsome Lady’ the widowed Caroline tells the unhappily married John that ‘if there is love between you there is faithfulness, if there is no love there is no fidelity,’ but he’s too slow to take the hint or ...”

“... escape prosecution for publishing Paine’s Rights of Man, unlike his friendly rivals George and James Robinson and a good number of less established booksellers; but in 1798, at the age of sixty, he found himself sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for selling a pamphlet by Gilbert Wakefield attacking the war with France and the corruptions of Pitt’s ...”

“... proved itself worthy of fiction. It was, before Sallis began his project, one of the foci for James Lee Burke’s Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux. Sallis had a proper respect for Burke’s achievements: his sense of place, his pacing, his ease of discourse. Burke was very good on food, on the Gulf, the tension in the transit between easy-living in the ...”

“... splashy older brother, the sleek, sociable (and seriously good) modernist painter of the 1920s, Gerald Murphy, patron of Picasso and Léger. (Together with his wife Sara, Gerald was party-giver-in-chief for the Lost Generation, that fabled crowd of American expatriates in Paris between the wars, and the likeliest model ...”

“... example, of the pardon granted by President Ford to his predecessor in 1974: Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States . . . do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offences against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from ...”

“... accidental. A chapter called ‘Coal Dust’, from Women in Love, begins with a set piece in which Gerald, a study in emotional inadequacy, attempts to exert his horrid will over a horse, but then switches mode abruptly to describe Ursula and Gudrun wandering around town on a Sunday afternoon, overhearing the lusty commentary of the colliers as they ...”

“... the book, in Margaret Drabble’s latest edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature: no Gerald Kersh, Kyril Bonfiglioli, M. John Harrison, James Sallis, Keith Roberts, Derek Raymond, Harlan Ellison. No Jack Trevor Story. Moorcock is there. He’s included, quite generously summarised, and not just as a ...”

“... one. I remember the conversation. My father said to her: ‘Do you hate Pakis as well?’ ‘No, Gerald,’ she replied. ‘I don’t hate anybody. I’ve never stepped inside a Protestant church in my life and I’m not going to start doing it now.’ I once wrote some words on a piece of paper and pushed them to her across the sofa. They said: ‘You like ...”

“... the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced he was ‘determined that the law shall be respected’ and that anyone aware of illegal CIA activities was obliged to report them. Nixon was finally forced ...”

“... In the old days a Jewish Tory MP, if not quite a contradiction in terms, was likely to be a Sir Gerald Nabarro – converted away from his Jewish faith and becoming a sort of caricature of the Tory squire. In the Seventies this changed sharply. Harold Macmillan’s alleged retort on seeing the first Thatcher Cabinet list – ‘there are more Old Estonians ...”

“... irrespective of rank and religion, which was something of an achievement in class-pocked Britain. Gerald Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, wrote in 1925: ‘It is melancholy to think that any village community should have rated the sacrifice of ardent young lives so low that it was held that their adequate commemoration was achieved by a cross of Cornish design ...”

“... we hear of Watkins until Parrot meets him again in New York, where he is busily impersonating John James Audubon, obsessively absorbed in his life’s project: the greatest book of bird engravings the world has ever seen – Birds of America. Watkins is horribly disfigured, ancient looking: ‘His pale blue eyes peered out from his own tattered skin as if they ...”