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“... mother, Rochester had been an undergraduate at Wadham, the most advanced Oxford college of his day. He was settling accounts with the Puritanism of the 1650s in which he grew up, and indeed with Christianity. In the conversations with Rochester which Burnet records, the poet attacked the sacred character of the Bible. He thought that all came by ...”

“... a former tennis professional of minor distinction, a TV actor recently sacked from his part as Dr Barry Catchpole in Sun Valley General, a man slithering down the ladder of celebrity into alcoholism, divorce and the humiliations of the ‘glamour industry’. In Paris, the playwright László Lázár gives a dinner party, unaware that in the darkened silences ...”

“... to get hold of it, and he gets very nervous when we go anywhere near it.’ His other colleague, Barry, likes to stick his lips out and clench his teeth and go DA-DA, in imitation of the guitar riffs on Clash records. He otherwise spends much time talking about music, films, Terry Prat-chett ‘and anything else which features monsters, planets and so ...”

“... a workmanlike account of an improvident life. John Wilmot was born in 1647 on All Fools’ Day. His father, one of Charles II’s most stalwart lieutenants, had fought for the king and fled the field with him after the royalist defeat at the battle of Worcester. The two men escaped together to Paris, where the grateful monarch made Henry earl of ...”

“... is a minor character, no more or less eccentric than the other Eagle Lake inhabitants who populate Barry Hannah’s new novel. They include Max Raymond, a melancholy saxophonist looking for a vision of God; Byron Egan, a preacher and ex-biker, tattooed on the cheek with a Maltese cross and given to injecting himself with holy water at the pulpit; Melanie ...”

“... training like many Premier League footballers do. You’ve got to put your four or five hours a day in, most days, even the top few guys.’ O’Sullivan’s attempts to alleviate his mental struggles – through running, or AA, or eating well, or self-help – suggest another aspect of his personality: a deep vulnerability he is always searching for ...”

“... his best-known book, Arctic Dreams (1986), after chapters on migratory routes, ice, and musk oxen, Barry Lopez recounts the legend of Saint Brendan, the sixth-century Irish monk who sailed north with his brethren in a leathern boat. The monks see an iceberg – ‘a crystal pillar’ – and row towards it, though it takes three days to reach, finally ...”

“... Jim returns to his favourite Carnaby St boutique circa 1966 and nods his shaggy head. ‘Hi, Barry! Hi, Stu! Got the new flares in yet?’ The two Goths behind the counter in Plastic Passion have heard about people like Jim. One of them looks out a pair of tangerine elephant loons left over from his father’s ‘Chocolate Taxi’ scene and throws them to Jim as a joke ...”

“... over the release of American hostages in Tehran. In the early hours of the morning on Inauguration Day, he called Blair House, where Reagan was sleeping, with exciting news about progress. Mike Deaver, the president-elect’s aide, told Carter it was too soon to wake him. At 8 o’clock, when Deaver finally tried to rouse the new president, telling him it ...”

“... as culturally over-extended. Stead was writing in the LRB about his friend and fellow Antipodean, Barry Humphries. Humphries is nowadays primarily a West End and small screen entertainer with his largest viewing constituency in Britain. The same – but more – could be said of Clive James. James has earned himself reputations as a television ...”

“... however careless and impromptu, into our own sightlines. The new biography of Audrey Hepburn, by Barry Paris, a writer already praised for his books on Louise Brooks and Garbo, is an acute, tender-hearted and entertaining dish of Hepburn facts – he interviewed friends and family, and has a sharp eye for her film-work’s idiosyncrasies; more important, he ...”

“... on Rodeo Drive. I was approached to direct a Mafia film called Donnie Brasco. The producers were Barry Levinson and his partner, Mark Johnson. We had first met when Levinson, Alan Parker and I had dinner in London. It was a wonderfully smug affair: the last three films we had directed, Rain Man, Mississippi Burning and Dangerous Liaisons, had between them ...”

“... is similar to that of many recent liberals writing in the analytical tradition, such as Brian Barry, John Rawls and Charles Larmore. These writers argue that, by their nature, conceptions of the good – theocratic, secularist, vegan, carnivorous, lesbian, polygamous, socialist, libertarian or whatever – give us insufficient reason to conclude that any ...”

“... rover of the deep, its huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, swimming ceaselessly night and day in search of anything that might fall into the cavernous maw and stay the gnawing hunger which drives the rapacious fish relentlessly on his way … There is something particularly sinister in a shark’s appearance. The sight of his ugly triangular fin ...”

“... is hard to hold together families in a low-wage economy without parental help or affordable day care). Economic liberty often unleashes all sorts of other, more carnal liberties (it is no surprise that the rise of market fundamentalism in the US over the last four decades can be correlated with the proliferation of pornography, profane music and ...”