“... Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen deals. They hesitated to invite the novelist William Gaddis because none of them could get through his mammoth novels. They relented, Friedman tells us in his memoir, Lucky Bruce, when Heller’s one-time agent, Candida Donadio, said not to worry – nobody read Gaddis’s novels. In the city, when they ...”

“... By luck, some Canadian missionaries active in a nearby town learned what had happened. They sent a white lawyer to defend the villagers and win their release. In gratitude, the villagers started to give up their old goddesses and accept baptism. They began sending their children to attend the schools set up by missionaries. Untouchables had long been ...”

“... what appeared to be ski pants. He had soft, unblemished skin, long, flowing hair and sparkling white teeth. Communicating telepathically, he explained that his name was Orthon, that he came from Venus, and that he was on Earth to warn mankind that the testing and use of atomic bombs was putting the entire galaxy in danger. ‘The beauty of his form ...”

“... and the House of Lords. The actual picture, Dr Alderman reveals, was much more complex: William Cobbett himself was fond of referring to the ‘blaspheming Jews’, Gladstone was a Whig and a great opponent of the Jews at one and the same time, while Disraeli was a Tory and the final Emancipation Act itself was a Conservative measure. How then, Dr ...”

“... there was. We owe the widespread belief that Robin lived in the time of Richard I (1157-1199) to William Stukeley (1687-1765), an eccentric scholar of ancient British history who fabricated for him a crazy family pedigree going back to the Normans. Knight argues that the search for the historical Robin is as quixotic as the search for the historical ...”

“... connections, Bute was decried as the new Highland adventurer. It did not help that another Scot, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, who was dogged by the smear that he was intent on importing Scots Romanist principles into the English common law, had become lord chief justice in 1756. Might Bute and his Scotch cronies find no better use for Magna Carta, English ...”

“... room is suddenly full of emphases: monochrome canvases (late 1950s, early 1960s) in which white is worked into black, wet on wet, so that the surface seems made up of choppy grey erasures. Out of this a black form emerges, uncertainly, because the lattice or matrix of brushstrokes is so uniform throughout. Nonetheless, there is a black floating ...”

“... ranges of survey data seeking the precise source of his magnetic attraction for the aggrieved white lower-middle and working classes. It will outlast the pundits holding forth on TV, collecting lecture fees and cranking out bestsellers that retail inside dope gleaned, single-sourced and second-hand, from somewhere near the elevators of Trump Tower. It ...”

“... tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.Eliot cast the longest shadow on the mid-century generation, not simply because of the brilliance of the poetry and essays: he was both the model and the anti-model for the New Criticism (espoused by Lowell and Jarrell’s teachers John ...”

“... was over the name. I favoured (homage to Izaak Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double e, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of ...”

“... in the summer of 1814, in which Cochrane and Cockburn sailed up the Potomac, dined in the White House on the banquet that the fleeing President Madison had left behind, then burned the city’s public buildings. Fifty years later, while protesting neutrality, Britain effectively sided with the South in the Civil War. Is it any wonder that in 1914 the ...”

“... of his body – and as unsafe. ‘Laurence Olivier is less gifted than Marlon Brando,’ wrote William Redfield in Letters from an Actor. ‘He is even less gifted than Richard Burton, Paul Scofield, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. But he is still the definitive actor of the 20th century. Why? Because he wanted to be.’ Holden’s book never reconciles ...”

“... ludicrously fake British accent that he reminds her of Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island. William Styron is almost as monstrous as Hellman herself: self-centred, nervy, and savage with contempt for anyone who gets in his way. When he accidentally burns the fancy pan-fried quail he is preparing for Hellman and her friends in Hellman’s kitchen one ...”

“... until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups ...”

“... the powerful Wingfield family and passed into the service of Edward IV. Charles’s father was William Brandon, who according to the Paston letters got himself a bad reputation, ‘for that he should have by force ravished and swived an ancient gentlewoman, and yet was not therewith eased, but swived her oldest daughter, and then would have swived the ...”