“... As charm is to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general ...”

“... With both the government and the Labour Party in terminal condition and little time for either to do much about it, our thoughts inevitably turn to the Conservatives, and to what they might do after May 2010. In a very general sense we know what they would like to do: cut public expenditure so as to restore ‘order’ to the state’s finances ...”

“... Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s possible influences on their early work. And yet, despite the eloquent advocacy of these two recently ...”

“... No American novelist​ has devoted as much energy as Percival Everett to the proper noun, its powers as engine, instrument and index. Towards the end of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (first published in 2013), a story about storytelling in which nobody is called Percival Everett or Virgil Russell, one of the narrators gives a list of 516 gerunds that encompass the whole of human activity ...”

“... Around eleven o’clock on Monday morning, I phone Dell Computers to query an invoice, but the accounts department is engaged, so I get put through instead to the development section of the first movement of the New World Symphony. The music I intrude on is intense and self-absorbed ...”

“... In April​ 1973, on a Pan Am 747 jumbo jet from London to LA, I took my seat in the upstairs dining room opposite a Cincinnati salesman and his wife. He sold screws – really. Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality that matched my elevated mood ...”

“... Programme – a terrible if irresistible pun – which first aired on 11 January 1982. The aim was to give viewers lessons in computer literacy. When it went into development, a suitable machine for use in the series didn’t exist. So the BBC drew up a list of specifications, and went in search of someone ...”

“... scientists, and in the early decades of the 20th century the only substance of its kind available to psychologists, writers, artists and philosophers eager to experience chemically induced hallucinations. The word ‘psychedelic’ was coined in 1953, by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond (in correspondence with Aldous ...”

“... It​ wasn’t immediately obvious, arriving at Alexandra Palace, that there was a sporting event taking place. The men (they were nearly all men) queuing up outside looked as if they might be there for a model railway convention, or an IT conference. It was a Sunday evening in January, and I had come to watch the evening session of the MrQ Masters snooker final, one third – along with the world championship and the UK championship – of snooker’s ‘triple crown ...”

“... worked on the new apartment blocks and public buildings in Barcelona between 1880 and 1910 began to play with a dual mandate, not merely innovative but Catalan as well, in an effort to create a national spirit in their buildings. They used the most modern methods available: in 1888 Domènech i Montaner used unadorned brick ...”

“... For​ Leavers at least, the morning of 1 February ought to have been like ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping’ (though, come to think of it, that didn’t go so well the first time). For Remainers, it was always going to be a case of ‘ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain,/On the bald street breaks the blank day ...”

“... through the woods, down a soft winding track, two minutes shy of the time we have been instructed to arrive, 10 a.m. on a bright Sunday morning, we see the man already there in the clearing, his right hand on the dog’s collar. Two minutes later, you feel, and he’d be gone. But this is the right person, undoubtedly, the one we have come ...”

“... To be fair to Alan Walker, I should confess that I’m an amateur pianist who loves playing – or trying to play – some of the virtuoso music Liszt both composed and, of course, performed: relatively easy pieces like Waldesrauschen and Un Sospiro, which are concert études, and also the three ‘Petrarch’ Sonnets ...”

“... fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond ...”

“... the world. I saw a headline in the Los Angeles Times that read: ‘After Levelling City, US Tries to Build Trust.’ I heard that military personnel were now carrying ‘talking point’ cards with phrases such as: ‘We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.’ I ...”