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“... reading some of the medical history that was being published in the Eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s ...”

“... in Women’ and of ‘the Use and Action of the Genitals’. This cursory description confirms Roy Porter’s argument in ’Tis Nature’s Fault that, although well-known, Aristotle’s Masterpiece has too often been dismissed as ‘a mere catchpenny pamphlet’. In a careful exegetical study Porter argues that ‘far from ...”

“... is a welcome replacement of the fussier and less accurate English version done by Helen Lowe-Porter for the original publication.) The novella was written after Mann helped pitch a film on the Ten Commandments to MGM. The film never got off the ground, but this text appeared as part of a rather uneven volume on the subject to which ten prominent writers ...”

“... not to anyone who mattered. But who knows? Say when Wittgenstein is doing his stint as a hospital porter at Guy’s and he’s wheeling some wretched casualty of the Blitz back from the operating theatre. Still dozy from the anaesthetic the patient comes round and is alarmed to find the frail porter with the burning eyes ...”

“... the two of them discuss the books he has been reading as they go. Writers under discussion include Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d ...”

“... from Rasselas as accurate, even ‘beautiful’ (John Haslam, 1808) and ‘poignant’ (Roy Porter, 1987) illustrations of the workings of madness. The old astronomer has come to believe that, far from merely observing the weather, he is regulating it: a reason for deep anxiety since his responsibility is greater than that of any monarch, and who can ...”

“... and the fear Apollinaire warned us of feels both distant and European. It’s a tidy irony that Michael Portillo, a former privatisation-randy Tory ideologue, is now making a living from nostalgic TV shows about the days when British trains weren’t crap, crowded, costly and late. If there isn’t a ‘market’ for something, there’s usually a market ...”

“... pages, offers a brilliant account of the history of staging in depth, taking us from Meliès and Porter through Sjöström’s Ingeborg Holm and Stroheim’s Greed to Preminger’s Fallen Angel, Cukor’s A Star Is Born and Spielberg’s Jaws. The possibilities of staging in depth seem virtually limitless, and the promise of stylistic history is handsomely ...”

“... matron in Leeds. The two elder boys were sent away, and Herbert was a boarder at the Crossley and Porter Orphan Home and School in Halifax. At 15 he became a bank clerk, at 19 entered Leeds University, where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the ...”

“... the quick brown foxes who understand the game and like to play it: Christopher Hitchens, Michael Winner, Emin again and Jarvis Cocker, whom she wanted to impress so much when he came to her house, she hid the pot-pourri. But she’s a little nervous – though she pretends not to be – around the hedgehogs, such as Hilary Mantel, in this book, and ...”

“... but it spread like a rash of entitlement to the North.Phil Oakey, from Sheffield, was a hospital porter; he lived for alienation, the post-industrial, David Bowie, and having a show-stopping haircut. He was the singer in the Human League. His hair was long on one side, covering the entire right half of his face, and short on the other. He ‘had the perfect ...”

“... The first time​ Tetty Porter met her future husband, Samuel Johnson, she told her daughter, Lucy, that she had never encountered a more ‘sensible’ man. Most readers assume she was praising Johnson’s sober, rational side; Leslie Stephen, writing in 1878, went so far as to commend Tetty’s penetrative ‘good sense’ for discerning the same quality in Johnson, despite his ‘grotesque appearance ...”

“... childhood; and Charlotte Rampling, very solemn, on the death of her sister and making The Night Porter – Plomley managing to avoid any mention of what it was actually about. (In case you’ve forgotten, the S&M relationship between a concentration camp survivor and her ex-SS officer lover.) Six minutes survive of a bracingly blunt Oliver Reed, though ...”

“... through on-the-record interviews much of the history of the rendition programme, particularly Michael Scheuer’s 1995 negotiation of a rendition and torture agreement with Egypt. (At the time, Scheuer was in charge of the Bin Laden unit at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.) Margot Williams of the New York Times studied reports filed by the companies ...”

“... read so much of it. The young Keats read Mary Tighe’s verses with pleasure, and the Misses Porter, of Romance fame, admired his ‘Endymion’. Barnard is right to emphasise just how important the market for poetry was, which was why Taylor and Hessey, the young firm which took over Keats’s Poems of 1817 from Charles Ollier, were prepared to treat ...”