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“... to Britten about the premiere of Peter Grimes, he is also shooting off a note to the copyist Roy Douglas asking: ‘Did you see or hear “Grimy Peter”?’ Asperities about fellow composers are in plentiful supply. Tippett was another admired colleague/bugbear. To Douglas in 1945 he describes him as ‘arse over ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... to be obliterated. Alongside the sagas were folk-tales and folk poetry, especially after 1890 when Douglas Hyde began to publish, and translate, material garnered in the course of his fieldwork in Connacht; every rediscovery caused jubilation among those in pursuit of the truest variety of Irishness, which was generally held to reside in the West. What precise ...”

“... spectators. But by the time Darius Khondji’s high-definition cameras find him, four minutes into Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, ‘Zizou’ is already sweating. Every few seconds, he blows the droplets away from his mouth; they collect and drip from his earlobes and his chin. There is no impression of effort ...”

“... of vile tempers, but was vile himself with a filthy perverted taste [i.e. anal sex]. From that day onwards to the very night, within a few moments of the time when a bullet sent that man to eternity, he was pestering her … she will tell you that Fahmy kept a black valet to watch over this white woman’s suite of rooms, conditions that really make me ...”

“... Frederick Swynnerton​ was a portrait painter born in Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man, in 1858. His father was a sculptor and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist ...”

“... company with epic. One could never be literary enough. By minute attention to abjectness – to a day’s events in Dublin in 1904, to a dog urinating against a lamp-post, to a river awash with empty bottles and sandwich papers – Modernist writers brought into view and made palpable a resistance to literature on the part of the world at large, which they ...”

“... the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait ...”

“... one about the dogs, cats, rabbits and other livestock which filled the church on the appointed day, and a follow-up about all the other clergy who were shocked and outraged by the impiety of the event. Then there was the case of the unhappy Blackpool and England footballer, who had financial and domestic problems and confided to Cudlipp that he would like ...”

“... are the instances which tell Of something which I know full well, I owe a death to you – one day The time will come for me to pay When your slim shape from photographs Stands at my door and gently asks If I have any work to do Or will I come to bed with you. ‘Exequy’ changes direction several times. It has moments of humour as well as of ‘black ...”

“... that the English, by virtue of their religion, literature and laws, were as Jewish as he was. Douglas Hurd and Edward Young’s Disraeli: or, the Two Lives, and Robert O’Kell’s Disraeli: The Romance of Politics diverge when they come to Disraeli’s Byronism. Hurd and Young wave it aside: ‘Disraeli aspired to a career like that of Byron, Shelley and ...”

“... of the Aran Islands and the Blasket Islands in Ireland. The attempt by Yeats and Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde to surround the Gaelic past with holiness had loud echoes in the efforts by Catalan architects and artists, from Gaudí to Miró, to establish the Romanesque tradition as quintessentially Catalan while the rest of Spain was Moorish. And the ...”

“... by women lepers who fled to the Caucasus and coupled with jackals? Do surnames like Dunn, Grey and Douglas, and place-names like Dublin and Blackpool, indicate concealed African origins? Were the Mende people of West Africa the first to navigate to Peru? Did Egyptians build Stonehenge? Is Aids the outcome of a genocidal white conspiracy to eliminate ...”

“... broad-bean-pod pâté or Shirley’s foul medames (‘In the Soudan, foul medames is eaten every day, at each meal, and no one ever tires of it’) or the African mung-bean concoction called Iddli? The Friends of the Earth diet does not exclude meat altogether: conscience can be appeased, to some extent, by eating lights, otherwise lungs (‘usually fed to ...”

“... tunnel connecting his lawyer’s house in the Mexican town of Agua Prieta to a cartel warehouse in Douglas, Arizona. Three decades later, he escaped from a maximum security prison through a tunnel that led to the shower in his cell. (According to one of his associates, the excavation was so loud that other inmates complained.) In 2011, only a few days after a ...”