“... out of her ‘Select Bibliography’.) All three are, self-confessedly, dwarfed by the late Gordon Ray’s authoritative two-volume biography, Thackeray, The Uses of Adversity (1955) and Thackeray, The Age of Wisdom (1958). Not to labour the point, the story of Thackeray’s life (one of the great Victorian closed books) is no longer much of a mystery. Nor can ...”

“... Was Wittgenstein a spiritual as well as a philosophical genius? Ray Monk’s exceptionally fine and fat biography puts us in a better position to answer this question than we have been hitherto. Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand Wittgenstein’s character is with the photographs that exist of his face ...”

“... light and saw two skeletal hands. It looked like a vinyl record, but it had been etched on an X-ray. Since then, Coates has collaborated on the Bone Music project with photographer Paul Heartfield, creating a website, a documentary, a travelling exhibition (London, Cardiff, Moscow, Trieste) and two books, X-Ray Audio ...”

“... was funnier.) D.M. Thomas offers a farcical interview with President O’Reilly in which the old man is so confused that he can only answer the question before the last:     ‘What is your outlook on death?’     ‘You’ll have to ask my wife!’     ‘What are your feelings about the possibility of a Third World War?’     ‘I’ll ...”

“... and the Queen, among others, and there are no plans to return them. Lalibela was named after a man born in the 12th century whose cradle was covered with a swarm of bees. ‘Lalibela’ apparently means ‘the bees recognise his sovereignty.’ His brother, however, did not, possibly because he was the King, and attempted to poison him but succeeded only ...”

“... institutions. Miss Wolf’s particular interest is the post office. The Thought Girl (1920) by Ray Cummings    Guy Bates, since childhood, has been in telepathic rapport with a girl who lives in the Realm of Unthought Things. That world contains all the inventions that have not yet been invented in this world. When they are invented here, they disappear ...”

“... the life, and there are crowded years ahead, though it is possible they may be less interesting. Ray Monk’s much-admired biography of Wittgenstein made one feel, for a while at any rate, that the subject’s weird ascetic life and his philosophy, which he himself felt sure no one would understand, could be represented as an intelligible whole. Now he turns ...”

“... It has stained glass windows and a shingle roof, and above its door he hung a plaque of a green man, fronds of plum trees issuing from his mouth. Beyond the shed is the plum orchard; beyond that the old apple trees, one with a half-finished tree-house he was building before he fell ill. If the alveoli from our lungs were unpacked and spread out, they would ...”

“... existed, to be sure, in the Twenties. Joseph Conrad had just died and Graham Greene was a young man getting published under the apologetic label of ‘entertainment’, but one glimpse of Minty shows the quality. Character is an elusive quality, but without it crime writing wouldn’t exist, any more than any other kind would – say, Boswell’s ...”

“... it was proof against age and against all those processes by which we are able to say that a man’s time runs out, but it was not proof against external accident. ‘The Watch’ in Learning to Swim For when a body floats into a lock kept by a lock-keeper of my father’s disposition, it is not an accident but a curse.     And Freddie Parr’s ...”

“... and their guns and holsters look clean and unused. Some police move into the lobby with an old X-ray machine. They make themselves comfortable. I am told every five-star hotel in Kuwait is to have an X-ray machine and metal detector, as if this was another one of Mr Radisson’s extraordinary services for his guests. The ...”

“... and I fly too high, And wake up in my bed this morning wondering why I’m an old white man in bed in 2012 in Manhattan Not next to a lovely redhead whose skin is satin. Pardon me if I grab the remote before I open my eyes. They’re going to televise One World Trade Center’s rise While the Empire State Building stands there and practically dies ...”

“... the aesthete, he was stultified by the permanent juvenility of the rock world. For the moralist, a man who could never be forgiven for ditching his wife. For the sociologist, an example of the perils of vertical social mobility. And for the numerologist, proof of the malevolence of the number 9. But had he lived, would he have entered 1985 rocking around the ...”

“... amoral drive to ingest and expand which still characterises American entrepreneurial culture. Ray Kroc, the hamburger guru of McDonald’s and pre-eminent fast-food entrepreneur, emerges as the hero of Fast Food. I had no idea that he was a man so strangely obsessed with the perfect french fry. ‘I was looking for work ...”

“... both the magical power of Hollywood, and its less than democratic creative constitution. Robert Ray’s A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema: 1930-1980 (its title playing on a controversial 1954 piece about the French cinema by François Truffaut in Cahiers du Cinéma) is the work of an intelligent American lover of American films engaging partly with ...”