“... were cut off by the edges of the frame, executed in bad lighting, or obscured when the performer, [William] Hurt, usually turned away from the camera, and hearing characters would sometimes talk without signing.’ Norden doesn’t spell out what is implied here: that for signing to be properly intelligible it must take precedence over lighting, composition ...”

“... grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from the white slave trade, in which Pennyfeather becomes unwittingly implicated, and for which he uncomplainingly takes the rap. After some strings are pulled, however, he is released from prison and goes back to Oxford to pursue his theology degree. So anonymous a ...”

“... its demolition in 1941 was a disgrace.Augusta Persse was born in 1852, and in 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, who was 35 years older than her. He died in 1892, and she outlived him by forty years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, as Roy Foster shows in his biography of the poet, because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area ...”

“... snaps, is a necrophile’s delight: photograph after photograph, in tiny, eye-straining black and white, of crosses, graves, plaques, inscriptions, bombed-out block-houses converted into monuments, decaying trench relics, dank rows of cypresses, grassed-over mine and shell craters, obscene-looking barrows, and yet more crosses and graves. Some of the photos ...”

“... to find when it was in front of me that I didn’t want it at all. I liked really thin, cheap, white sliced bread. I found that I had an interest in making a sandwich with plenty of butter and two grilled rashers. I can’t think why I could eat this when I could eat nothing else. I could also eat a sandwich of tinned salmon. A few times I made a big ...”

“... Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer ...”

“... as ‘a man in a crowd of eunuchs’. The liberal critic Théophile Thoré (then publishing as William Bürger) contributed to the buzz by reporting that the entire canvas had taken only four days. That wasn’t true; but, like another of his claims for the picture, it stuck. ‘Henceforth,’ he declared, ‘Camille is immortal and will be called The ...”

“... move its audience entirely. Julius Caesar, coldly clear-cut and sonorous, reddens its black and white Roman world with the fountain of blood at its secret centre. And then there is Hamlet. Hamlet is too large to include in a list: it crowned and summarised everything Shakespeare wrote in the 1590s, and lit up its audiences with excitement, awe and amusement ...”

“... to appear of the mammoth Life of Mahomet from Original Sources by the Scottish Orientalist Sir William Muir, a colonial administrator in India’s Northwest Provinces. Muir drew on the eighth-century hagiographer Ibn Ishaq, the Persian scholar al-Tabari, and the ninth-century biographers Ibn al-Waqidi and Ibn Sa‘d, pre-eminent authors of the sira, the ...”

“... huddled together … everywhere crimson mingling with the brown, and here and there a waxen-white face with draggled hair staring up into the smiling heavens … Such was our introduction to the glories of war.’ Several men were burned alive. ‘The carnage it caused is awful,’ a Turkish lieutenant wrote after one engagement. ‘Dismembered parts of ...”

“... Out of context, his epigraphs can seem like sly jokes and maybe some are. The quotation from William of Ockham that begins Biting the Air – ‘Every property is the property of something, but it is not the property of just anything’ – relates to language and logic; but the poem is partly about intellectual property, and it isn’t uninteresting ...”

“... his European self. Jo Stoyte, whose collection of books Pordage has come to archive, is a William Randolph Hearst-style Hollywood tycoon who owns ‘BEVERLEY PANTHEON, The Personality Cemetery’, a vast graveyard landscaped as a country estate which contains replicas of famous buildings from all over the world: of the Tower of Pisa (‘only this one ...”

“... home where ‘the panel of one of the windows opened up halfway, pushed outward by a bare, white arm that stretched out from a loose, flowing sleeve. We could see by the gleam of the torch … the ravishing shape of a young girl appearing on tiptoe between the open shutters.’ Graziella is Beppino’s sister. She is innocent, sensual and 17. ‘Her ...”

“... maypole, topped by deer antlers. A lawyer called Thomas Morton became the local Lord of Misrule. William Bradford, the governor of the colony, viewed this revival of the ancient Bacchanalia with horror. Armed men arrested Morton, who was sent back to England, and the maypole was chopped down the following year.It isn’t surprising that many New Englanders ...”

“... state, some of them unspeakable crooks and their wives not much better … One has given one’s white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore; to be queen, I have often thought, the one essential item of equipment a pair of thigh-length ...”