“... to only $2500 a year, really did somehow challenge and defeat the crooked umpire (whom the young Pound goes on to suggest might have been bribed), this was very much the exception rather than the rule. Pound’s casually bullying letters to his father suggest that in the main Homer was more than happy to accept the role of awestruck progenitor and ...”

“... asked why they wanted to take my picture one of them emitted a little hissing laugh to himself. A young English assistant took us upstairs for lunch. On the way we passed a bank of slightly old-fashioned video screens with a control panel attached. I knew editing of the project was taking place in the building, but it wasn’t clear whether the screens were ...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... turn wilfully vague when interrogated about their past. Most enigmatic of all are the dads who die young, or when their children are young, or both: photographs preserve them, and memories (if they exist) reanimate them, but whatever’s expected of a father usually dies with them, whether it’s ...”

“... good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly demoralising Millenium Hall (1762), on the supposed consolations of living in a ...”

“... but esoteric science. The part of Bill Clinton is here played by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist David Baltimore and the junior female colleague is not Monica Lewinsky but a Japanese-Brazilian-American immunologist named Thereza Imanishi-Kari. Their relations are not sexual but wholly collegial. The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but ...”

“... favourite from the start and duly emerged as the winner. But he did not win by a short head from David Lloyd George. You have to scour the list to find him in 79th place, listed as ‘English, born Manchester (1858-1928)’. The part about Manchester is correct: Lloyd George’s father – who was not the only Welsh schoolteacher to move there – died there ...”

“... her late, happy romance with Judge Lord; Austin’s prolonged adultery with Mabel Loomis Todd, the young wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor; and the unexpected discovery after the poet’s death of nearly 1800 short poems. The stories of heartbreak and mental breakdown that colour so many earlier tellings of Dickinson’s life Gordon examines in ...”

“... childhood in Africa and spent a year in bed with a leg brace; my mother caught tuberculosis as a young woman in Dublin and spent many months in a sanatorium. Her fiancé, whom she’d met in the sanatorium, died. Stories like this were not unusual among people born in the early decades of the last century. One of the main reasons global life expectancy has ...”

“... The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of ...”

“... weekly magazine I edited, Haolam Hazeh, published an Arabic edition. One of its employees was a young man called Rashed Hussein from the village of Musmus, a gifted poet with a promising future. He told me that some years earlier he had been summoned by the military governor of his area. At the time, Arabs in Israel were ruled over by a military authority ...”

“... Black New Yorker in the middle of the 20th century.In the recent DeCarava retrospective at the David Zwirner gallery, Hallway stood out among the rows of silver gelatin prints. At first glance, it appears as a dense mass of what the curator Zoé Whitley called his ‘infinite palette of grey tonalities’, which take on volume in their shadowiness. It ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three interminable evenings with animated postcard footage re-used to the point of ...”

“... the bust Epstein made of him, although he had defended the Christ) and Henry Moore (who, as a young man, had been generously treated by Epstein, but stood in the way of a London site being found for Ecce Homo) were both less than wholeheartedly pro-Epstein. So were fuming academic sculptors and the authors of tabloid gloats and broadsheet sneers. These do ...”