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“... of pigeons as grey but they are composed of an oceanic palette: deep blues and greens flecked with white, like the crest of a wave. When not mangled or amputated by wire and string, their feet – which the poet Mina Loy described as their ‘coral landing gear’ – are strong, elegant and reptilian. They can see far further and with greater clarity than we ...”

“... to immigration to pornography. A forthcoming essay collection edited by Ryan Johnson and William Cohen will be entitled Filth. The interest in ‘waste-theory’ may be seen as a recyclable and non-biodegradable byproduct of a number of related tendencies in contemporary literary studies: 1) the borrowing of critical paradigms from science and social ...”

“... Christians, ‘Mahometans’ and ‘idolaters’. Idolatry eventually included everyone in the non-white world from Aztecs to Taoists, even, during the Crusades, the Mahometans, regardless of their strict prohibitions against graphic representations of God or of the Prophet. (In The Song of Roland they are seen praying to a menagerie of idols, including Apollo ...”

“... of the Other Woman’). When the New Yorker writer Lillian Ross embarked on a relationship with William Shawn, the magazine’s married editor, she couldn’t even bear to call it ‘having an affair’, never mind ‘mistressdom’. In Ross’s view, a mistress was ‘a heavily mascaraed woman in a corny movie, wearing a negligee and sitting around sulking ...”

“... upheavals – were linked, and should be treated in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved ...”

“... when I was about five. There were a few blissful memories of being scared out of my wits by William Hartnell in Dr Who, then nothing but The Archers, Round the Horne and Just a Minute for the next decade. By contrast, my wife grew up in a household where radio was virtually unknown while the television was switched on in the morning and remained that ...”

“... dumbness, oblivion and hard labour. In 1953: ‘I only want to be left alone in my little white bed with my book and my seconal and my last libation. Tonight I’ve drunk inordinately, at least a dozen hi balls during the past eight hours.’ Three days later: ‘I have washed a “pinkie” down with Scotch and am naked on the bed with my journal and ...”

“... Curriculum, and Evelyn Waugh saw the possibility of comedy in the matter before anybody else, his William Boot a writer keen to make the rat-tat-tat of his typewriter fall into sync with the sound of gunfire over the hill. In America, a season in France or a period in the foothills of Spain was once thought to be a rite of passage for a first-rate writer of ...”

“... ways. Edna Waugh had been spotted at the age of 14 by a friend of her father, a barrister called William Clarke Hall, who urged him to send her to art school. By the time she was 16 Hall was ‘determined’ to marry her and she and Ida were in fraught correspondence about what to do. Ida sensibly argued with both parties that Edna was simply too young to ...”

“... out of complacency, and more alert to the suffering of others. Molesworth had been taught by William Gaskell, the Unitarian minister and husband of Elizabeth Gaskell, who was another accomplished practitioner of supernatural fiction. Gaskell’s ghost stories, more ambitious and substantial than Molesworth’s (try her unforgettable ‘Old Nurse’s ...”

“... with the weight of material and social success. The flights on Concorde, the Porsche, the ‘this white burgundy comes from Mick’ (from Julian Barnes’s diary). He records meeting, in the same week, Princess Margaret, Ionesco and David Hockney. David Bowie offers to take over a part in The Real Thing; the Duchess of Devonshire appears as ‘Debo’ on page ...”

“... or anything composed in a language other than English, or by anyone who wasn’t a white man. He had as little time for science fiction that didn’t follow his own strict prescriptions as he did for ‘so-called mainstream fiction’ – a category that he seems to have defined in contrast to science fiction, on the one hand, and the work of ...”

“... the circumstances, unavoidable.The Smiths were a family of significance. Bodichon’s grandfather William inherited a great wholesale grocery business, and in the 1780s and 1790s bought himself social and political status. The family home in Clapham was exchanged for a magnificent town house by Hyde Park and two hundred acres in Essex. He acquired Old Masters ...”

“... were as real to him as Joan of Arc’s voices, Blake’s angels or Elwood P. Dowd’s giant white rabbit, Harvey. Trollope’s obsession about his characters originates in the kind of trauma that classically deranges sensitive minds. His wretchedness as a schoolboy is famous from the extended descriptions of it in An Autobiography. He uses terms like ...”

“... among the most famous photographs ever taken. So stark is the contrast between Aldrin in his white spacesuit and the empty grey desert he stands on – the black of space beyond, the sun out of sight – that while it is, obviously, a photograph of a man on the moon it is also a picture of the living and the dead. For Armstrong, who always saw things ...”