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“... for housekeepers, repairs to tennis courts, swimming-pools; there’s even a suggestion that Douglas Hogg claimed for cleaning out his moat. The papers are suddenly full of pictures of Home Counties mansions set in acres of manicured lawns, straight out of Country Life, allegedly maintained at taxpayers’ expense. Proof, in case anyone has ...”

“... 1935. (Rounding the Horn ends with his family tree, starting with ‘John Stallworthy d. 1744 and Ann d. 1771’ and running to ‘Jon b. 1935 and Jill b. 1938’ and the new generation, ‘Jonathan, Pippa and Nicolas’.) His father was a surgeon who settled down to a practice in Oxford. His mother was a housewife with a gift for music and a good ear for ...”

“... precedents recounted in books such as The Female Soldier (about Snell) or the 1804 memoirs of Mary Ann Talbot, who claimed to have served in the navy during the French revolutionary wars. Among Bulkley’s few surviving letters is one to her wastrel brother John, written as he was shipping out with a penal regiment bound for the West Indies. She chided him for ...”

“... I craved academic and hipster respect of the kind that Pynchon and Gaddis got and Saul Bellow and Ann Beattie didn’t. But Bellow and Beattie, not to mention Dickens and Conrad and Brontë and Dostoevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I actually, unhiply enjoyed reading.’ More and more ‘the postmodern programme, the notion of formal ...”

“... preservation, authenticity and vogueishness – have been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be ...”

“... The detailed stuff on Bogart’s career before Bacall has been covered so often before, notably by Ann Sperber and Eric Lax, Jeffrey Meyers, and Stefan Kanfer. You may opt to hurry through the first two hundred pages to get to 1943. But from then on Mann the researcher, disinclined to fall for the myth, opens up a complicated marriage. The age gap did ...”

“... than a touch of urban myth about the stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost ...”

“... not indulge in first-name familiarities on the lines of ‘Sidney Goes to the Gallows’ and ‘Ann (90) Fells Burglar.’ This first-naming of all and sundry is the curse of the age and is rendered no more acceptable by the fact that nurses and policemen do it. I wonder, though, if your Mr Dimbleby writes a book at the age of 88, will you refer to him ...”

“... public debate on policy resulting from ministers and civil servants having to be accountable. Sir Douglas Wass, the former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, admitted in his 1983 Reith Lectures that ‘the knowledge that your department is going to be examined in detail on the background to a policy statement is a great encouragement to be rigorous in ...”

“... of Bolivia, General Rene Barrientos, apparently first consulted with the American Ambassador Douglas Henderson, then ordered Che to be summarily shot. (Jean Cormier’s new biography follows the Cuban line that this was a decision made in Washington.) Che’s diary of the Bolivian campaign was subsequently extracted from his captors, and published in ...”

“... in the next breath he will write swoonily to a girlfriend: ‘you’re ... still the same Ann Frick I remember from what now seems a million hazy dreams ago.’ Just when you are comfortable with the oscillation between Byronic hellraiser and lovelorn ‘Hunty’, you stumble on Thompson’s letter to his mother. Strapped for cash in San Juan, Puerto ...”

“... do not exist, often with bibliographical exactness: it continues in the fictions of Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams, Roberto Bolaño and Mark Z. Danielewski, among many others. The Polish science fiction writer and author of Solaris, Stanisław Lem, wrote long introductions to four imaginary books in Imaginary Magnitude (1973) and a whole volume of reviews of ...”

“... was forced out of the ministry for trading and promptly went bankrupt. As Ruth First and Ann Scott tell us in their 1980 biography of Schreiner, this catastrophe ‘scattered the children and marked the end of the family home’. It seems, on the face of it, as noteworthy as the maternal spanking. The Companion is similarly silent about Olive’s ...”

“... on the fearsome Morteratsch glacier to a failed attempt at recovering the body of Lord Francis Douglas, the uncle of Oscar Wilde’s Bosie, killed during an ascent of the Matterhorn. Replying from the comfort and security of his grace-and-favour house at Hampton Court, Faraday was glad to be occupied with more quotidian matters – ‘we are progressing in ...”

“... at Boulder, Colorado, or Grand Forks, North Dakota. ‘Prisoners of the Press Conference’, as Ann Charters captions them. Explainers of what is gone, apologists for what never happened. Literary stocks busking to sustain their market value, justify the next complimentary, two-seat air ticket. Corso always piled into these interviews with generous ...”