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“... read:Revelations, the biography of Francis Bacon, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn SwanA Curious Boy, Richard ForteyTurning the Boat for Home, Richard MabeyThe Stonemason, Andrew ZiminskiKiss Myself Goodbye, Ferdinand MountWhat Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, Mark DotyPastoral, James RebanksPhilip Roth, Blake ...”

“... nuclear weapons programme. The team was led by an aggressive IAEA inspector called David Kay, though it was not really an IAEA operation but a US one: the deputy chief inspector, the American diplomat Bob Gallucci, called most of the shots. ‘The team,’ Gallucci said in 2001, ‘was very, very special … we had a lot of team members with special ...”

“... several different versions of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though there are signs that he may now repent ...”

“... yellow sands’, in which a succession of voices discourse on the fairy painter and parricide Richard Dadd (odd that no one comments on the singular aptness of his surname). Dadd, having taken his father for the devil, went at him in Cobham Park with a spring-knife – a weapon more effective than Christy Mahon’s loy. Poor dad – or, if you like, poor ...”

“... debacle with a clumsily broad brush. The milieu she describes of ‘Terry-Thomas dashers and Kay Kendall girls’ lacking in social ‘self-awareness’, for whom ‘the threat of levelling tendencies’ and ‘the encroachment of Lucky Jim Dixon’ had yet to loom, is as crude a caricature as anything in the press coverage of the Lucan affair.From this ...”

“... and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the original idea of The Rite of Spring, which was visual and frankly ‘Scriabinistic’ rather than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in ...”

“... of the Baroness Dunn. Henry (‘Taipan’) Keswick and the now ex-ministerial but ever-amusing Richard Needham are fellow-guests. A heated disagreement between them about Chris Patten’s governorship of Hong Kong flares up and amicably subsides. Entirely by chance, we meet the Pattens in London the very next evening for the first time since long before ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... race ... as if writhing under a load of disreputable guilt ... I forgot to mention the sight of Kay-Shuttle-worth, pale, with the tears running down his face, consumed with curiosity to see who was there, peering about, then recollecting himself and renewing his decent grief.’ At the Coronation he notes the judges like red caterpillars, a little boy ...”

“... or other changed. The inquiry into the Matrix Churchill affair by the lively and loquacious Richard Scott, a famously bicycling judge, played its part. The new willingness of the judges to be interviewed also helped, even though the interviews were invariably conducted with a deference that had long been withdrawn from ordinary politicians. The ...”

“... Twomblys, accidental Jackson Pollocks, accidental works by Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois or Richard Tuttle or Jean-Michel Basquiat. (See recent coup to the right: an accidental Philip Guston. Guston’s 1968 painting Boot is above, and below a CE artist’s picture, now in my collection, of an eight-fingered glove.) At such moments, you not only feel ...”

“... pastiche: The Magic Mountain, the search for Corvo, Kafka (Francis Jay temporarily becomes Franz Kay) and Borges are alluded to. Magic and dirty realism are invoked. There is much virtuoso play with modern critical theory, in which Bradbury exhibits prodigious expertise while at the same time suggesting that it’s all something of a con. The narrative hops ...”

“... in the field as possible; he accuses his journal of lack of inspiration; he and his wife Kay, during her visits, take turns at being depressed. His book is very good on all of these things. Impatient, he is also tenacious. Consider the panda, he asks, and he proceeds to do so with cumulative scientific tact. Having radio-collared those pandas which ...”

“... and Windus archive (one of his very few manuscript sources), Inglis comes on a 1953 letter by one Kay Burton accusing Williams of plagiarism and claiming that the section on Ibsen, in his first book, rested on some Cambridge lectures by Muriel Brad-brook. Inglis quotes from Williams’s ‘cross’ denial, claims (without giving chapter or verse) that his ...”

“... is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his ...”