“... I suppose I thought, feeling foolish that I’d been taken for a ride (or taken her for one) and cross that I’d fared worse than if I’d never lifted a finger, these mixed feelings to be the invariable aftermath of any transaction involving Miss Shepherd. One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation. It must have been a ...”

“... deductive powers and a desire for social justice’, from the Lone Ranger and Tonto to Batman and Robin. Rex Stout’s creation Nero Wolfe, at least, has no desire for social justice – his amorality, never quite proven nor quite going away, being one reason for the richness and rereadability of the books. In other ways he fits the pattern. He and Archie ...”

“... genre hack’s best hope of getting into newsprint. There was, for example, fulsome coverage for Robin Cook (Derek Raymond) once he had gone; local colour pieces (memory tapes from the Coach and Horses) outweighing the tepid inches of a life-time’s review space. Cook, that most civilised of men, most troubled of writers, was one of the last to sustain a ...”

“... trousers, Hawaiian shirts, flamboyant hairdos, kerchiefs around their neck’. Drag, cross-dressing and ‘effeminate’ style of all kinds have a complex history, as does their direct opposite, an unmarked and ‘invisible’ form of gay dress that challenges stereotypes of homosexual identity and identification. The December 2000 issue of ...”

“... in the New York Times, his future biographer Robert Shelton described him as ‘resembling a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik’. In the nine months since he had arrived in New York he had become a seasoned performer on the Greenwich Village folk club and coffee-house circuit, but he was less familiar with the recording studio. He was ...”

“... at the connection. 17 October. Lunch in a restaurant in Chelsea with Maggie Smith and Beverley Cross. As Bev is paying the bill the proprietor murmurs that General Pinochet is lunching, as indeed he is, just round the corner from our table, though not quite within spitting distance. It’s a table for eight or so, Pinochet with his back to the ...”

“... hours. (With another hour thrown in to detour recent excavations, schlep the peninsula path and cross the odd motorway.) How long could it take on public transport? The Millennium Experience copywriters spoke with breathtaking self-confidence of a ‘12-minute’ ride from the centre of town (by helicopter presumably). The diggings on the peninsula (a ...”

“... demands right-wing concessions, especially as they pertain to refugees.Thanks to the journalist Robin Alexander’s Die Getriebenen: Merkel und die Flüchtlingspolitik (as yet untranslated, but something like ‘The Impelled: Merkel and Refugee Politics’), we now have a fine-grained account of Merkel’s decision to open the border in September ...”

“... Arch in 1955 In the mid-19th century, the construction in quick succession of Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras resulted in the demolition of much of Somers Town, the area just to the north of the three. The stations were built outside what was then the city boundary because a Royal Commission had banned the construction of any stations within ...”

“... the fates of the Wasilla police chief, city attorney, museum director and others who had dared to cross her in the past. She chaired the Conservation Commission (in Alaska, the word ‘conservation’ means something rather different from what it means elsewhere), on which she was joined by the chairman of the state Republican Party, Randy Ruedrich, a former ...”

“... create a do-it-yourself television service for the Mozambique Ministry of Information, a kind of cross between Kino-Eye and Video Nation which eventually came to nothing. 6. Back to Switzerland. In 1976, Godard and Miéville, who was herself Swiss, left France for good and he returned to his childhood haunts on the banks of Lake Geneva. There they continued ...”

“... the Pakistani city of Quetta. To get there from his village he had to pass through Kandahar and cross a dozen or more checkpoints. ‘There was no such thing as the Taliban movement back then, and travelling was becoming really hard, sometimes even impossible,’ Burjan told me when I met him in Kabul. ‘We would pick a route through villages in the ...”

“... It is of course a picture of the rise of Christianity which has taken quite a beating recently. Robin Lane Fox has shown that early Christianity was really a very middle-class affair. Nietzsche dedicated Human All Too Human – admittedly in one of his spasmodic reactions against Schopenhauer – to Voltaire, saint of the Enlightenment. The connection ...”

“... end of January 1826, Clare wrote to tell Taylor that he couldn’t cope with further delays and cross-purposes. Taylor wrote back saying that no progress could be made because the ‘July’ poem was ‘unfit for Insertion’ and the next day wrote: Heretofore I have submitted, and apologized, and taken Blame to myself, – because I was resolved, if ...”

“... soldiers’ written and spoken words in the years 1915-17, when Forster was in Alexandria as a Red Cross searcher; it shows a reach into areas of experience he was not to touch on elsewhere in his writings. Altogether 28 diaries are collected here, separate initiatives covering 72 years, but the core of interest lies in Volume II, given up entirely to a ...”