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“... a silent carriage for the journey home; bruises earned fighting off the kind of men who insist on wearing riding boots in bed. The ‘bad’ Bembo cousin, Wilfred, reinvented as Billy Baxter, spurns provincialism and becomes a radio comedian, a personality. A fruit-eater. A roadside sex pest, a killer. Giles Doughty (Binding names with relish, as if he were ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... living, however eminent. Take Mike Newell, 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 ...”

“... The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such as Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza (wearing a ‘100+ carat diamond’), Al Taubman and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. De Pury was private curator to Baron ‘Heini’ – Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza – then chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, then established Phillips de Pury, which he ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... be called as a witness in the contemporary American quarrel concerning multiculturalism by both David Suchoff and Judith Friedlander, the translators of (respectively) The Imaginary Jew and The Defeat of the Mind, and be ascribed a different position by each. (Interestingly, the 1988 English translation of The Defeat of the Mind, entitled The Undoing of ...”

“... and his text shows more than a passing resemblance to other, better, secondary sources – David Robertson’s George Mallory, Walt Unsworth’s Everest, Peter Hopkirk’s Trespassers on the Roof of the World, Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel’s Mystery of Mallory & Irvine. By contrast, Last Climb is not only well written, it derives authority from the ...”

“... of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But Vinen, who was born in 1963, when the last national serviceman was demobbed, draws on memoirs, interviews and official ...”

“... chief solace of his labours’. He saved a lock of her hair, and began to wear the ring she was wearing when she died. He never took it off, ‘by day or by night, except for an instant at a time, to wash my hands, since she died. I have never had her sweetness and excellence absent from my mind so long. I can solemnly say that, waking or sleeping, I have ...”

“... not have written The Corrections to be optioned by HBO – the chamber music of our time, with David Simon our Mendelssohn – but he agreed to the option, and so the only thing that prevented his book’s debasement was an inept script that died in development. Kraus writes in Franzen’s translation: ‘To be responsive to literature, you cannot be ...”

“... Iraqis in military uniform were to be seen. Men were firing on the American column, but they were wearing civilian clothes. The risk of civilian casualties was inevitably high. Most of the Iraqis on the road were on their way to work, some were just curious. On TV the night before Iraqis had been told that US forces were miles away. Everyone was ...”

“... radio, time-saving and sometimes life-saving conveniences which he disdained. In the words of David Grann, whose compelling new book, The Lost City of Z, tries to make sense of the man and his last mission, Fawcett ‘ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose’. He was an ...”

“... and development of the great writer. He was born on a Friday, on the same day as his young hero David Copperfield, and for ever afterwards Friday became for him a day of omen ... Born in Portsmouth on Friday, February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was the second child of a slim, dark-haired, pretty woman. On the night of his birth, Elizabeth Dickens, who ...”

“... Williams’s five boys. In April 1994 Maxine had left the family home she shared with her husband David Handley in Newark Knok, and taken the kids to live at the house of her boyfriend Alex Joseph, at Lobelia Close in Beckton. Daniel went to Beckton Cross primary school, and was one of those kids who’d talk to anyone. He already had girlfriends, and was one ...”