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“... long winter between the Battle of Alamein and the Normandy invasion. At the time, the 24-year-old Douglas had pretty much recovered from wounds inflicted by German 88s in the Western Desert and by spring he was back in action. On 9 June, three days after landing in France, he was killed behind enemy lines. We can trace the beast to a passage in From Alamein ...”

“... Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked about jazz with Robert Graves and about Keith Douglas with Edmund Blunden, the new professor of poetry. Poetry was both ...”

“... day as they circled the exercise yard.De Profundis, a 55,000-word letter addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, written by Wilde during the final months of his two-year sentence, is a strange literary creation, a hybrid text. It was the only work he produced while in jail. On 4 April 1897 the prison governor informed the Prison Commission that each sheet of the ...”

“... When he says that he went to Crawford, Texas to interview George Bush, or that the retired general Jay Garner, briefly the head of Iraq’s post-invasion government, came over for breakfast at his place, he is emphasising his intimacy with those who talk to him. But in Plan of Attack he introduces himself in another way. He says that he regretted not pushing a ...”

“... Linda died of emphysema in 1954. Porter, ‘a homosexual who had never seen the closet’, as Alan Jay Lerner put it, was always true to Linda in his fashion. After she had parted ways with her philandering first husband, who was reported to have had sadistic conjugal tastes, Linda ‘had had enough of the sexual side of marriage’, according to Brendan ...”

“... maps’ of the land, by listening to the stories told about it. ‘I am a lexical cartographer,’ Jay Arthur writes. ‘I “map” through language, through the words that have accumulated about particular places. These “maps” are the conjunctions of the physical world and the imagination, a way of seeing a landscape, or, more precisely, a collection of ...”

“... had they all agreed on devaluation than Wilson would back off, haver and cavil. Gaitskell and Jay came to distrust him utterly while Dalton said of him: ‘He trims and wavers and is thinking more of what senior ministers – and even senior officials – are thinking of him than of what is right.’ Ultimately Gaitskell forced through a devaluation ...”

“... is that there was no agreement within the Treasury about what should be done. Sir Douglas Wass, the permanent head, was, at least in the early part of 1976, rather a devaluationist, whereas Healey’s instincts were to worry about the inflationary consequences of devaluation. There were also divisions about the seriousness of events. Since the ...”

“... or would it be reassuringly familiar? One way of settling the issue, suggested by the late Stephen Jay Gould, would be to wind the tape of life back to its origins, around four and a half billion years ago, then let the tape run again and see what happens. Ideally, we’d repeat this a few thousand times, and if then all of the reruns ended up producing ...”

“... the White House, who kept telling us . . . that the system was perfectly sound, who sent General Douglas MacArthur to burn the camp of the unemployed war veterans who had come to appeal to Washington, we wondered about the survival of representative American institutions; and we became more and more impressed by the achievements of the Soviet ...”

“... Reagan was a tough man to convince. He nominated yet another neo-con academic-turned-judge, Douglas Ginsburg, and challenged his antagonists to continue the struggle. But Ginsburg’s past use of marijuana caused a scandal, and Reagan reluctantly called it quits. He returned to the path of pragmatic conservatism with Anthony Kennedy, who passed through ...”

“... industry went into a spin. Star Trek and Star Wars were wistful dreams of what might have been. Douglas Adams’s Seventies radio masterpiece, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was a nose-thumbing at the horror of it all: a whole universe, 15 billion light-years across, and hardly anybody in it at all, except on the surface of a small planet near the ...”

“... audience, Lockwood makes a rare foray into figurative language. With a flourish worthy of Stephen Jay Gould, he produces a metaphor drawn from Swift and the Scientific American to exemplify the idea that there is an ‘approximate correlation between the size of a work of art and the “amount of aesthetic experience” that it contains’. That implied ...”

“... became a ‘celebrity’: a boutique director as fervently admired by Hollywood royalty – Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin – as he was in the European salons and cine-clubs. October (1928), which begins with the abdication of Nicolas II and concludes with the storming of the Winter Palace, followed; and then The General Line ...”

“... the railway bridge. It’s not difficult to guess where they’re making for: their new gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube2 in Hoxton Square. You don’t really need to go inside the sugar-frosted box to see what’s happening. You can get it from the street. This is top dollar, scratchcard art. Either it works in one hit or forget it. If it doesn’t jab ...”