“... who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage I could act, but people said I had no ...”

“... document the biography. Once the book appeared, it was given short shrift in eminent quarters. Sir John Pope-Hennessy, writing in the life-enhancing Now!, described it as ‘tawdry’, while working up a tremendous lather of indignation at the impertinence of the whole enterprise. Professor Sidney Freedberg availed himself of the Boston Globe to lay about the ...”

“... Sorbonne and psychiatric teaching demonstrations at St Anne’s Hospital, translator of Havelock Ellis into French, found the pronouns of gender oppressive, she would certainly have been able to express her unease. Did she want to dissolve the categories? It seems more fair to say that she was fine with a binary system, as long as she wasn’t expected to ...”

“... for what Wallace called ‘conspicuously young’ first-time novelists: Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, writers Wallace despised. His next book, Girl with Curious Hair (1989), saw him starting to focus his brainpower in haunting, enduringly strange tales of television, flatness, chemical and electrical engineering: ‘Words,’ apparently, ‘will wither ...”

“... literary executor) saw fit to print – based on the texts of the 1846 and 1850 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell and the 1847 Wuthering Heights – is that it encourages us to read the poems and the novel in the order of their composition. O’Gorman, a strong proponent of the view that Gondal is the ‘key’ to Emily’s imagination, is quick to point ...”

“... building-site, where they will be warned off by stern notices: GAS ESCAPE, GAS RELATED EMERGENCY, ELLIS & EVERARD CHEMICALS. There are pictures of ferocious German shepherd wolf-dogs, red cone roads, and a vista of churned slurry (future parkland). In a few short months, just imagine, all this will be leafy avenues, multi-choice entertainment complexes and ...”

“... forehead at the front, the flukes at the back – and even in the middle. Melville tells us that John D’Wolf, one of his uncles, was in charge of a ship raised clean out of the water by a whale slipping beneath it and then ‘setting up its back’. During his time on the Essex, Owen Chase had a similar experience in one of the ship’s boats, when a whale ...”

“... just because it lies almost wholly on a high flood risk area. ‘It’s this awful thing,’ Hugh Ellis of the Town and Country Planning Association told me. ‘They’ve been completely forced into a corner: you either hit the housing target or you don’t. If the government doesn’t offer any other way of meeting that challenge, what the hell do you ...”

“... spectacular ways of showing what their product could do. At an exhibition in San Antonio in 1876, John Gates (then just an agent for the manufacturers, later an iron magnate in his own right) sealed off part of the town’s central plaza with barbed-wire fencing and packed it with dozens of fierce-looking longhorn steers. When the animals charged the ...”