“... be a biographical dictionary of an array of fictional characters from great movies: the likes of Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund, George Bailey, Travis Bickle and Norman Bates, who turn out, in the interstices of the entries, to have entangled lives and a dark plot all of their own. If only Howard Hawks wasn’t dead and had made a movie of Suspects we could ...”

“... and the crumbling of services on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of ...”

“... dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become an alienated, albeit highly lucrative profession rather than a sport. The game’s most flamboyant and most ...”

“... knee breeks black silk stockings high heeled shoes with large buckles, blue coat, yellow vest white neck cloth with stiffner and frilled shirt – he is one of the Queen Ann folks’. The pretty brick so-called Queen Anne style of the 1870s which Thomson thus mocked was the architecture of a perplexed generation. Invented largely by ex-assistants of Sir ...”

“... What he hoped was that go-getting New Labour business leaders would offer themselves: Bob Ayling, Richard Branson, Marjorie Scardino . . . The person he did not have in mind was Ken Livingstone, who, perversely, seemed perfect for the post. Who better to give ‘voice’ to the capital than the man who had bravely said ‘no to no say’ in 1986? Of ...”

“... It’s hardly surprising that Sandy Arbuthnot falls for this sex goddess of espionage; even Richard Hannay is tempted: ‘I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but longed to arouse her interest.’ The idea of the vamp extracting secrets from hapless men is old, but took on a ” new life during the First World War, when spy fever raged. Tammy ...”

“... even a fall in property values. They also consistently identified it with ‘latte-sipping’ or white wine intellos, like the stuck-up East Coast elites familiar in US conservative rhetoric. Right after the vote, Alistair Mant wrote in the Age that ‘Australia is steadily becoming more polarised and more American . . . John Howard’s message throughout ...”

“... pay and to return $250,000 to the Trust. It was a spectacularly extravagant decision to commission Richard Meier in 1984 to build a new Getty Center – including the chief museum, the Research Institute and the Conservation Center – as a cluster of buildings on a hilltop in Brentwood accessible only (for ordinary visitors and most staff) by a steep ...”

“... time’; the smell of ‘piss and disinfectant’ was everywhere; he discovered black flies and a white worm in his clothes; it became difficult to light a candle due to lack of oxygen.This revealed what should have been obvious since the 1950s: people weren’t the priority. The government’s main aspiration was to ensure its own survival in some form. The ...”

“... Youthful​ and moustachioed, he strikes a dashing pose in his plumed helmet, red velvet jacket and white foustanella, hand on hip, legs apart, a scimitar at his side. This is Major Richard Church of the British-funded 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry, as painted in 1813 by Denis Dighton ...”

“... young man from United Nations relief shows me through the refugee town, a cluster of soiled white huts on an arid hill,’ he wrote from Jordan in 1957. ‘Barefoot women balancing biblical water jugs on their heads line up before the only well. Men listlessly converse in a coffee house of naked walls.’ ‘They fled what is now Israel nine years ...”

“... 22 September. XR has constructed a lightvessel on wheels, about the size of a bus. In large white letters on the red hull: ‘Sound the Alarm. Climate Emergency.’ It makes its stately way along the front from Hove towards the conference centre, with an entourage of noisy activists, many on bicycles, sounding their bells. It’s equipped with an ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of druggy, trippy, sci-fi – just the boy’s ...”

“... female accomplice just about to dive, far out at sea, into the jaws of a helpful shark, the white-faced red-clad woman looking ‘like what came aboard the ship to shoot dice in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The extreme diffusion of the Ancient Mariner in modern culture helps to show how very odd a classic Coleridge’s poem is: we tend not to be ...”