“... lecturer at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands, is discovered begowned (it being graduation day) screwing a begowned finalist on his office floor. It is not a joyous coupling. Sefton’s mind is not on the job, but on his office door which he fears may be unlocked. His mind slips back to an earlier occasion when he was teaching at the University of ...”

“... politics, but that was long ago, and few remember. In 1964, the Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, grabbed the attention of scientists by vowing to lob a missile into the men’s room of the Kremlin if the Soviets misbehaved. Goldwater, a major-general in the air force reserve, aroused widespread alarm, especially among alumni of the Manhattan ...”

“... around for very long. In 1786, the labouring-class poet Ann Yearsley (‘Lactilla’, from her day job selling milk) published a memoir in which she berated her patron, the evangelical abolitionist Hannah More, for embezzling the proceeds of Yearsley’s own Poems on Several Occasions. Scholars have been repeating for decades that Yearsley called this ...”

“... parties and public entertainments, she was more like a favourite than a queen: more like Du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress, the frequent target of lampoonists. She imposed her style on Versailles, and it was a style of contrived, artful, expensive simplicity, of model dairies and muslin; it was a charade of private life. Invited to the Petit Trianon to ...”

“... setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount. During the day the poet would sit for the painter beneath an open skylight in the high garret of the house. When the light failed the two men turned to talking and walking in the garden. One evening, just after the sun had set, something flashed across the sky and fell into ...”

“... reach, our author has the material to fill the gap. Most of the 1960s feminists grew up when Doris Day was the fastest-talking dame on the screen. DiBattista has a refreshing admiration for Day’s technical accomplishments, which were indeed considerable, but there is no disguising the fact that the declension from His Girl ...”

“... last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s 90 not looking much different from when I first got to know her at Bianchi’s in the 1960s. Barry as usual fires off the jokes which are almost ...”

“... inter alia, occupied the middle floors; and in the basement there lived the late and much lamented Barry Carman, Australian-born author and writer of radio documentaries, a great traveller (Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society), the most entertaining raconteur I have ever met, and a very close friend of the Empsons for a great many years. But the ...”

“... in Indo-China. The second headline, also right across the page in what must have been a tough day for sub-editors, reports the FBI’s discovery of three corpses, believed to be of three missing civil-rights workers, in a swamp in Mississippi. For me, and for most of my American friends, it’s been all downhill since the war and the civil rights movement ...”

“... afraid to count – will do that Monday morning, – but I think I have $60 left. That’s $2 per day for this month. Wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t need junk. I spend $2 a day on junk alone. The same letter contains a brief reminder of the other burden that remained with Burroughs throughout the Tangier period and ...”

“... lost original. The text’s effectiveness has been tested where it most counts, in the theatre, by Barry Kyle’s recent production at Stratford. This used the A-text, and an all-male ensemble, and achieved at least one moment of shock which nearly had me hastening for the doors like those terrified spectators in Exeter. Its virtues of pace and clarity are to ...”

“... intellectual thrust behind Knight’s many interests. Like other cultivated liberals of his day, he was radical on principle, and applied this guiding insight to the arts in what now seems a curiously literal way. When discussing the ancients, he valued the primitive, early or original; for painting, his ideal was direct dealing with nature. He created ...”

“... eight hours and 40 minutes. During the next session the sittings were even longer. ‘Ten hours a day for five days in the week for seven weeks,’ Canning wrote, ‘is hard work.’ The strain would soon kill him; it had already driven Castlereagh to nervous breakdown and suicide. Wilberforce managed to carry on only with the aid of a harness to relieve his ...”

“... what has been achieved than surprised by the alleged misdemeanours of its recently departed boss, Barry Munitz, who resigned in February, agreeing to forego more than $2 million in severance 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 ...”

“... with her to the Eternal City her spoiled, neglected, bored, troubled, adolescent son, Joe (Mathew Barry). To Caterina’s guilty horror, she discovers Joe has become addicted to heroin. They are sexually drawn towards one another, but, after Joe has lain between her thighs for a few tense seconds in a seedy hotel room, she tremulously reveals the existence of ...”