“... early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective stories.’ Japanese readers would understand quickly that Tokyo Year Zero concerns a real-life serial killer, as notorious there as Peter Sutcliffe here, but ...”

“... Jane Austen favoured names which give almost nothing away about status or nature (Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), but she could in some circumstances use names which suggest meaning: the wild Marianne Dashwood is an early example of a flighty heroine lost in a moral forest, and Mr Knightley, well, he’s not going to be a cad, is he? The ...”

“... like Wollstonecraft, Robinson, Williams, the novelist Amelia Opie and the novelist and dramatist Elizabeth Inchbald. Hays was self-conscious about her looks, never allowed her portrait to be taken, and was punished for the crime of being plain in the macho chit-chat of men she had imagined were her friends. The last section of the book will be the most ...”

“... sharply flavoured work (the Complete Poems are with difficulty bulked up to 240 pages: they make Elizabeth Bishop look lax if not garrulous); for the unusual way time – history – is precipitated in a literary life. ‘Bunting had a knack of being in the thick of things,’ Richard Burton observes in this first proper biography: it feels like a flagrant ...”

“... complaining that ‘news management’ had become ‘news invention’. Even the young Queen Elizabeth was moved to remark to her press secretary: ‘I think the basic dishonesty of the whole thing was a trouble.’ Now, 30 years on, Lance Price, himself a former BBC reporter who then worked as a media adviser to Tony Blair, has brought the story up to ...”

“... anniversary of The Second Sex in 1999, there were still no plans for a new translation: that year, Elizabeth Fallaize and I decided to draw attention to the situation again. Fallaize, whose premature death at the end of last year Beauvoir scholars mourn, analysed the effects of the vast cuts Parshley made in the chapter on ‘The Married Woman’. I wrote ...”

“... A few years back, when the dead-windowed block at the foot of the park was still the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, a giant Mickey Mouse was choppered in to put the frighteners on the sick kids. And also to act, if only we had recognised it, as a premature ambassador for the coming corporate bonanza. The soft-spoken Californian rodent was ...”

“... AuctionWeb. The 18 bits and bobs included a 1967 Superman metal lunchbox, an autographed photo of Elizabeth Taylor, a 1952 Silver Dawn Rolls Royce, on which the bidding stood at $38,500, and issue six of The Maxx, a comic book, on which the bidding had reached 75 cents: it was the cheapest item, and the earliest to be listed, at 17:44:27 PDT on 6 September ...”

“... might have occurred. Could it be that we are in the world described in Lord of the Flies, or in Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee’s latest novel, where the protagonist proposes that there are no laws for the prisoner of war who ‘does not belong to our tribe. We can do what we want with him … cut his throat, tear out his heart, throw him on the ...”

“... rural leaders, deliver services and win respect. The quality of journalists in Iraq has been high: Elizabeth Rubin for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move ...”

“... lavish and well reproduced (with the sole exception of the portrait of the Moorish ambassador to Elizabeth I following preliminary page 64, a painting which hangs in the Shakespeare Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as ...”

“... and his songs are glittering with cribs from everything he ever loved, from A Taste of Honey, from Elizabeth Smart, from Karel Reisz’s films, everything, including (especially) the Kitchen Sink, jokes nipped from Oscar Wilde, Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood. He loved to do versions of his favourite songs by Twinkle and Cilla Black and even by brand new bands ...”

“... Argus. His childhood was privileged and isolated; in 1953, aged eight, he was taken on the Queen Elizabeth to see the Coronation. Argus was rich, powerful and ‘fundamentally dishonest’, with the directors regularly trading in assets which they bought from and sold to the company, always at a profit to themselves. Black’s father was one of the six main ...”

“... and then to Edinburgh, where she met Cumming’s father – she changed her name from Betty to Elizabeth, a rejection of the identity she had been given.But this adoption story was still not quite the truth about the Elston family. Betty uncovered the real story of her childhood by looking at a photograph. As a teenager, she needed to have an official ...”

“... a big heart, as his work for Aids charities makes clear. Such work put him in closer contact with Elizabeth Taylor.She was incredibly kind … although you had to watch your jewellery around her. She was obsessed. If you were wearing something she liked the look of, she’d somehow just charm you into giving it to her; you would walk into her dressing room ...”