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“... job of political officer at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. It sets up that narrative cage, or hide, which is now a Theroux speciality. He is the spectator indulging an affectionate – sometimes a whimsically sentimental – sense of place: but protected from any messy involvement by being merely ‘stationed’ or breaking his journey. Having a ...”

“... by Edward I of England) were soon established as Robert de Brus, fifth lord of Annandale, and John Balliol, lord of Galloway. Both claims originated in the marriages of the daughters of David, earl of Huntingdon, the youngest grandson of David I of Scotland. Balliol had a claim by primogeniture, as the grandson of Earl David’s eldest ...”

“... hasn’t yet looked into the extent of this practice.As children of the spied-on, my brother John and I knew that the telephones in both our parents’ houses were tapped (they divorced when we were young). My dad had been a surveillance target since the formation of SDS, and probably before. It was obvious, sometimes, talking to a schoolfriend on the ...”

“... One of the more extraordinary revelations in A Better Class of Person, the first volume of John Osborne’s memoirs, was the fact that the author was proposed as the leading man in the 1948 film The Blue Lagoon. The teenage Osborne by his own account had a hollow chest and acne, and a loin cloth would not have shown these off to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston ...”

“... the mad at Bicêtre asylum in 1793 (a much celebrated event that never actually took place), or John Conolly abolishing the use of restraints on his arrival at Hanwell asylum in London in 1839. As John Foot stresses throughout his exemplary account, myth and reality aren’t easily separated in Basaglia’s story. The ...”

“... daughter. Their relationship is tense. She is not Cordelia. They will not sing like birds in the cage. He flees from her back to Camden to be taken care of by ‘Vaughan’, a mothering Irish slattern from his days at the Slade. ‘I intend,’ he says, ‘to put up a struggle.’ Let’s hope it avails. Storey’s early work, appealing as it did to a ...”

“... composer of the Blue Danube Waltz owned a number of sea-birds. One day he left the door of their cage open. The birds followed democratic procedure in deciding whether they should escape. Only a small number voted approval.’ Which episode reduces to the words and to the promised homophone, ‘Les trois mouettes de Strauss: pour’. These are up-market ...”

“... This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals possessed souls. Descartes ...”

“... and dirt, piles it on), who is holding out his own toy for the other boy to see. He is shaking the cage, baiting its inmate – ‘a live rat!’ The poem ends: ‘And the two children laughed at each other in a brotherly way, and their teeth were equally white.’ A live animal is so much more fascinating than the splendid doll, for reasons that underlie the ...”

“... possibilities of language and the eccentric image, invoking ‘My nine-tiered tigress in the cage of sex’, asking: Who at the kiss, who has not seen, over The waterfalling hair at the shoulder of Life, Death from his own face staring out of a glass. He moves often between ecstasy and absurdity: What when borne upward breaking from heaven downward It ...”

“... the only restrained beasts. Tam and Richie are always being ‘herded’ in and out of buildings; John Hall compares them to roaming wildebeest, and tells his brother to ‘take them to the pens ... That’s the best place for them.’ The Holocaust parallels, too, are laid on pretty thick. Donald describes the ‘permanent electric high-tensile fence’ as ...”

“... will my flailing material assume?’ Carter, one gathers, felt the opposite to Welty. She told John Haffenden, in 1984, that in The Passion of New Eve, she created Tristessa, the transvestite movie star, ‘in order to say some quite specific things about the cultural production of femininity’. Her training in medieval literature had given her a liking ...”

“... In her speech accepting the Premio Galileo Galilei, which opens the second volume, she credited John Florio, a brilliant promoter of Italian learning in 16th-century London, with introducing her not only to Giordano Bruno but also to ‘members of the Warburg Institute, then newly arrived in London with their wonderful library’. In her dealings with past ...”

“... Powerlessness, his 1980 study of quiescence and rebellion among Appalachian ‘mountaineers’, John Gaventa noted that where ‘a positive self-image is not portrayed for a particular group, that group may develop a sense of inadequacy about itself, reinforced by how other groups project their media stereotypes on them’ – and he isn’t talking about ...”

“... Wrestling was big. Both WWF and WCW were available, briefly, on terrestrial TV, and my friend John and I founded our own wrestling magazine. We hashed it together with the help of the pre-broadband Ask Jeeves internet, surreptitiously, with nerve-shredding slowness, loading pages during IT lessons so that we could copy and paste match reports into no ...”