“... it with phosphorus and calcium, to the detriment of rare alpine plants.A delicate issue. The John Muir Trust and the other owners of the land around Ben Nevis have constructed a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ at the foot of the mountain, and are removing the memorials from the open hill. As for ashes, well, the Nevis Partnership says: try throwing ...”

“... outposts, white ones sent to London from missions abroad – are full of entertaining examples. John Russell’s 1967 dispatch from Brazil begins: ‘Like the surface of the moon Rio is short of water, covered in dust and pocked with deep holes.’ American diplomats wrote of hotels in Xilin which provided contraception as standard and noted ‘no mention ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... In​ ‘Dream Song 364’, quite close to the end of the sequence, John Berryman’s avatar/protagonist Henry is once more being remorselessly flattered. He has surely read everything there is to read. (One thinks of Mallarmé’s opening line from ‘Brise Marine’, ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres ...”

“... among journalist colleagues for taking his success too seriously.Woodward turned to the comedian John Belushi and another kind of fall: tragic early death. He wrote books about the CIA and the Pentagon, on Clinton and Alan Greenspan, carrying on at the Post as well, making a name for himself as a reporter and author others wished to emulate. He’d brought ...”

“... The elder brother quickly turned into a young dandy. One of the funniest photos Lartigue ever took was of Zissou in the boating pool at Rouzat in 1911. Zissou is sitting in a ‘rubber pocket’, a recent invention (not his) for duck hunters. It consists of a fat inner tube onto which are moulded a pair of rubber legs, dimly present below the surface of ...”

“... happily in the ornamental pond there, but the other, taking advantage of the not very long lawn, took off for home, presumably Regent’s Park. In the morning its companion did the same.26 January. Come back on an early train from Yorkshire to catch the last day of the National Art Collections Fund exhibition at Christie’s. Expecting St James’s to be ...”

“... aspects of one another: a triple-headed monster, like Cerberus. Short historical digression: it took a while for this system to spread everywhere, especially in the United States, where arguments about the link between the banks and the state and the money system have been a recurring theme. In How Would You Like to Pay, a lucid short book on new money ...”

“... Hollis, also out of a job, created his best-known and most widely disseminated work: the cover for John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), the book that accompanied the documentary series. (Berger had taught Hollis drawing as a student, and Hollis also designed a striking jacket for his novel G.) The first episode opened with Berger wielding a Stanley knife in ...”

“... chairmanship of the group helped salve his conscience. Benn was less at ease when the contest took place in the autumn and he found himself humiliated, winning just 11 per cent of the electoral college, thereby cementing Kinnock in the post. He felt let down by the unions, which had encouraged him to stand and then failed to support him. This sequence of ...”

“... On​ 28 September 1992, the artist and London nightclub impresario Leigh Bowery took the stage at Kinky Gerlinky, a peripatetic club then established in Leicester Square. Wearing sunglasses, a headscarf and a striped cotton dress, the imposing Bowery had got himself up as Divine – his most obvious precursor – in John Waters’s film Female Trouble (1974 ...”

“... when questioned, agreed: ‘I shall tell you the truth,’ he said. ‘I loved him greatly, I took pleasure in his company and I slept with him several times.’ Yet he said they had not had sex, a denial reiterated when a disbelieving bailo asked outright whether he had taken the active or passive role. Gregorio then stated that he had, however, twice ...”

“... refuges for repentant prostitutes or bankrupted merchants. Shortly before his death in 1791, John Wesley looked back on the century as one in which ‘benevolence and compassion toward all the forms of human woe have increased in a manner not known before, from the earliest ages of the world.’ Not everyone was sympathetic to forms of woe – especially ...”

“... of Canterbury in the run-up to Anne Boleyn’s coronation. In a letter printed on 20 October 1890, John Marshall RA proposed an alternative theory: that the skull constituted ‘a punning signature of the great artist’, ‘hohl’ and ‘bein’ being the German (loosely translated) for ‘hollow bone’.There were debates, too, about the identities and ...”

“... which it might not otherwise have roused. Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll (the murdered man). Sir John Henry (‘Jock’) Delves Broughton (the presumed murderer). Diana, Broughton’s second wife, who was later to become successively the wife of Gilbert de Préville Colvile and of Tom, the fourth Baron Delamere. Gwladys, Lady Delamere (Tom’s ...”