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“... entertains, to judge by the 15 pages in Food, Wine and Friends, which carry a reproduction of the star himself, hair silvered as a salmon trout, cheeks puffy as a soufflé, skin shiny as a persimmon. It is, as he puts it, a very visual book, and the political message it conveys is that to him that hath, it shall be given: not only Hintlesham Hall to live ...”

“... which underly the anti-do-gooder school. He was in a strong position to do so, having been a star at William F. Buckley’s National Review even while it was heaping praise on Tom Wolfe (as it still does). Wrote Wills: ‘It takes a very dull or skewed acquaintance with our history to think that élite interest in reform arose at last (and only then as ...”

“... and the feelings of pitiable personal irrelevance induced by the aura around the show’s star, Beyoncé. Billy’s responses to ‘the ritual torturing of a difficult song’ – the American national anthem – in the executive box, and to the militarised abundance of the Cowboys’ equipment room, are complicated too. Fountain’s writing is very ...”

“... of oarlock and oar rose into the woods of black pine crusted with lichen. I moved like a dark star, drifting over the drowned other half of the world until, by a distant prompting, I looked over the gunwale and saw beneath the surface a luminous room, a light-filled grave, saw for the first time the one clear place given to us when we are ...”

“... Amis doesn’t like journalists (if you didn’t know that already, you will now, having read Christopher Tayler’s review a few pages ago). This doesn’t stop journalists from loving Martin Amis. When the Man Booker Prize longlist was announced last month, reporters were delighted to see his name on it. Peel it back, and underneath appear the ...”

“... Christopher Ricks’s new book makes available many of his distinguished lectures given in the Eighties and Nineties. The essays retain a sense of occasion, and of a star performance on Ricks’s part, while the book has been designed with the aggressive sobriety that signals a class act ...”

“... just come now,’ he once said calmly when a camera was threatening to overheat). Often he would star in his productions himself. Alfred Kinsey’s cinematic oeuvre first came to light in 1972 when Wardell Pomeroy, who worked for Kinsey and had taken down 8000 of the 18,000 sex histories Kinsey amassed, mentioned the films in a biography of his former boss.1 ...”

“... enactment of the Contract with America, Gingrich seemed almost casual about the defeat of the Star Wars budget. I suspected him of arranging to lose the vote, despite the many laser and satellite treats it would have afforded him, because he knew that the sheer cost would undermine his other tax-cutting proposals. Whether or not I was correct in that ...”

“... for a bungled invention. Vidal knows this very well, and speaks, in Pink Triangle and Yellow Star, of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald wanting not to go into movies but ‘to live as if they were inside a movie. Cut to Antibes. Dissolve to the Ritz in Paris.’ But Vidal himself has a perfectly clear sense of the real as real. ‘A movie is a response to ...”

“... and signed depositions which was characteristic of non-common-law courts like Chancery and Star Chamber, and of investigative proceedings against those suspected of treason, where torture was quite commonly used. Martin needs to extend his theory in this direction because Bacon fairly frequently uses this inquisitorial model, including torture, as his ...”

“... or to make eccentric judgments sound like received wisdom. In his account of Hoggart’s star turn in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial in 1960 – Penguin had been charged under the Obscene Publications Act for putting out an unexpurgated edition of Lawrence’s novel – Inglis dwells predictably on the Establishment snobbery personified by the ...”

“... he had misjudged the literary world that would in a month turn his friend from a nonentity into a star. Not seeing a need to spell out his real meaning was a major symptom of Larkin’s condition, as Monica, especially, understood: ‘While he did not make the true cause of his offence explicit, Monica would surely have realised that he was embittered by ...”

“... player in a necessary process of ‘modernisation’ (roughly where Michel Carmona stands) or as a star figure in the creation of ‘the city as a work of art’ (the title of Donald Olsen’s book on the subject, published in 1988). Aesthetics were not Louis-Napoleon’s strong point. In the eclectic medley of Second Empire styles, his basic preferences were ...”

“... to death, in unexplained circumstances, in a high-security prison cell in 1992. His son and heir, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, is the man the Jamaican army and police were looking for when they killed at least 73 civilians in a raid on the Tivoli Gardens estate in West Kingston in 2010. So there are more than enough killings to go around. James begins his ...”

“... I first came across Christopher Logue’s ‘account’ of the Iliad in 1975 at Oxford where I went to hear a vigorous reading by two young men of Patrocleia, his version of Book XVI. It was an opportunity to experience the poem in its original medium, by the ear rather than the eye. Homer himself had probably chanted his verses plucking the strings of a lyre, like the bard Demodocus in the Odyssey and for many centuries after his death people did not read Homer: they listened to skilled rhapsodes, whose dramatic delivery mesmerised audiences and earned the performers ample rewards, as we know from Plato’s Ion ...”