“... loss, Fildes’s confident entry into the sanctum sanctorum, the study in the chalet at Gad’s Hill, confirmed the delusive intimacy which reading publics yearn to be reassured they enjoy with their idols. We were close to him, and he is gone, the painting says. Our yearning is satisfied differently now. Dickens House retains its loyal visitors, but for ...”

“... other 20th-century wars. The films Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Casualties of War present images of brave Americans overwhelmed by the brutality and senselessness of the struggle. Although American battlefield losses in World War One, Korea and Vietnam were roughly comparable and far less than in World War Two, the ...”

“... his mind, though not his accent, when he discovered a fast vanishing way of life among the rough hill farmers of his first parish. Yet for all their mud-sodden realism, the ‘Iago Prytherch’ poems he wrote at this time are clearly the work of someone trying hard to convince himself that he might have much in common with ‘an impotent people,/Sick with ...”

“... except his supercilious brazen bounciness. Hrabal’s style (or at least how it comes through Paul Wilson’s translation) is similarly freewheeling, exuberant, torrential, full of food and drink and wild scenes in cafés and athletic sexual encounters. Much of it strikes me as being more like what the Germans think of as uproariously funny than we ...”

“... In 1972, Routledge and Kegan Paul published The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, a Wagnerian epic in which history went to town in exuberant, zestful and flamboyant fashion. Understandably, the two volumes won immediate and widespread acclaim as a tour de force of entrepreneurial inspiration and editorial skill: ‘a study in superlatives’ was the response of one ecstatic reviewer ...”

“... Millennium Experience, set ablaze. Flames visible across the river from Beckton Alp to Parliament Hill. ‘A man said to have a slight Irish accent said: “This is the IRA. We have planted bombs at the southern entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel. For goodness sake, do something about it. We want the area cleared.”’ So Gareth Parry reported in the Guardian ...”

“... male’, an essential player in many scenarios who exists to give support and advice. Paul Henreid in Casablanca is a good general example, but, in addition to older relations and colleagues, there are specialised subcategories like lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists and impresarios (see if you can think of at least five of each). Categories are not ...”

“... there is the instance of the Harrier jet, which mysteriously ejected its experienced pilot over a hill in Wiltshire on the summit of which only six months previously a crop circle had been formed.What about the jelly? I said. In your book you said you’d found inside one of these circles a blob of luminous white jelly and it was a completely unidentifiable ...”

“... afternoons catching trout. From the small car park a track leads through woods to the top of the hill. The views are majestic. The Firth of Tay lies below, and beyond the Carse of Gowrie are the Grampian hills, presently under fresh snow. Westward up Strathearn one can see Ben Vorlich and Stuc a’ Chroin, even Ben More if it’s clear. The view is vast, but ...”

“... thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle. The film begins with a rape about which the victim, Huppert, is ambivalent. This sent the critics, particularly male critics, scuttling to and fro wondering whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or ...”

“... having your life picked over, but having it picked over by sneering toffs is very grim indeed. Paul Hill and Gerry Conlon have separately told me the same story of how, during their trial for the Guildford bombings, they used to stare at Sir Michael Havers QC, their prosecutor and chief tormentor. Havers had a nervous twitch and when the defendants ...”

“... be many who are unfamiliar with the outlines of the Scott Fitzgerald story: the early years in St Paul as the humiliated son of a failed businessman (and as the inordinately proud descendant of Francis Scott Key, author of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’); the glorious salad days at Princeton University, which he left without a degree; the wartime courtship of ...”

“... of Heroes, the Valhalla Monument built by Leo von Klenze at the behest of Ludwig I of Bavaria on a hill overlooking the Danube (it’s also the subject of a painting by Turner, who was present at its opening in 1842). Friezes display Germania, the symbol of German unity in the 19th century, and Hermann or Arminius annihilating the Emperor Augustus’s ...”

“... Film Institute to improve the minds of Hollywood hotshots. He was in a class with David Lynch and Paul Schrader.Something in him was set on making movies, though years later he would also adapt the Kenji Mizoguchi film Sansho the Bailiff (1954) for the stage. In addition, and almost to demonstrate his caring and not caring, he wrote an early draft of what ...”

“... to the parklands once tended by the bucolic poet Chris Torrance), then transplanted to Notting Hill (crucible of all the counter-culture follies he was later to deride). An instinctive autodidact, Home was soon weeviling through bookstall fodder, from skins and sorts and bikers to the half-forgotten magi of the Gothic, to Black Mask, Up Against the Wall ...”