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“... with attention to authors from Homer, Chaucer and Charlotte Yonge to Donald Barthelme and John Barth. A number of the contributors focus on 18th-century fiction, others on 20th-century film, two places where one might most readily expect to find evidence of sequelmania. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s self-fulfilling prophecy in The Terminator, ‘I’ll be ...”

“... trope.Then several things happened. The owner of Books and Bookmen, an operator by the name of John Dosse, took the opportunity of emulating the Masada faction and the Goebbelses, and committed suicide himself. I received a moist letter from the editor of the magazine, written in the tone of ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’ I was accused in print, by ...”

“... Milk Wood and Beckett’s All That Fall came into being; and drama thrived – the careers of N.F. Simpson, Pinter and Stoppard were nurtured there. Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote in the New Statesman that ‘the whole musical landscape’ was ‘likely to be transformed by the arrival of the Third Programme’; Edward Sackville-West in Picture Post thought that ...”

“... often indulged friends or relatives. (Play It as It Lays was scripted by Dominick’s brother, John Gregory Dunne, and his wife, Joan Didion, and was an adaptation of Didion’s warning novel on Hollywood.) But he threw parties, and for a few years real class people came, and he took their pictures. He hadn’t set out to be a studied photographer, but he ...”

“... the Duchess of Windsor. The Marchesa had been the Duke’s mistress for fifteen years when Wallis Simpson arrived on the scene. Blackwood explained to the old lady how the Duchess was being sequestered in Paris by her lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum, who was obsessed with her, and that she was officiously being kept alive, although rumoured to be comatose, to ...”

“... de Sales in Geneva, bitterly viewing from his window his former cathedral, now occupied by John Calvin. Silence follows close on The History of Christianity, which was written to accompany the BBC television programmes; the preceding magnum opus, Reformation, is distinguished by its rich inquiries into eastern Europe, and other points usually beyond ...”

“... days, a clunky wooden casket into which revolving wax-covered cylinders were slotted) on which John Seward records his medical and psychiatric observations. Harker’s fiancée, Mina, uses another new invention, the typewriter (not yet thirty years old when Dracula was first published in 1897), to transcribe the recordings, journal entries and newspaper ...”

“... society which was monochrome, buttoned-up and circumscribed, but fundamentally benign and (to use John Major’s celebrated phrase) ‘at ease with itself’. That ease was, of course, predicated on the exclusion and silencing of certain social groups: there are almost no people of colour in Ealing films – or in many British films of the 1950s, for that ...”

“... commissioned a comprehensive survey of refugee movements. To superintend the project, it appointed John Hope Simpson, a persuasive and highly energetic man who had worked in India and Palestine, directed National Food Relief policy in China and served as vice-president of the Refugee Settlement Commission in Athens. ...”

“... were Winstanley, Gow, Broad, Lapsley and at a later date Dennis Robertson and the egregious Simpson. Secateurs in hand, they moved in summer from snipping off the buds in the gardens in the morning to contemplating the lads in the town bathing place in the afternoon. This interest in good looks was hardly surprising. From the age of eight, the English ...”

“... from the Wordsworths. For de Quincey courted, and eventually married, a local girl called Margaret Simpson. The Wordsworthian response, which had been territorial in the case of the ‘moss-house’, now became directly censorious. Like Hazlitt in a later incident, de Quincey had brought libidinousness to a terrain dedicated to the ideals of Tory, paternalist ...”

“... think. He even tried to persuade his pet astrologer to discover favourable auguries for the match. John Fowles, typically, fantasised about seducing her and imprisoning her underground, not necessarily in that order. Pablo Picasso claimed that only the princess would be a suitable bride to be the châtelaine of his vast new villa, La Californie. At ...”

“... in 1781, and that of the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was ...”

“... white, ethereal cloud’. Depending on the setting and production-run, $75 to $200 would get you John F. Kennedy, Napoleon or Marilyn Monroe on your finger. Dancing Naked is partly an autobiography, mostly an explosive voiding of rheum on the idiocies of contemporary science and culture. Mullis presents himself as a professional eccentric, a voice crying in ...”

“... long suffering Queen Alexandra. If Edward VIII had not abdicated, but had instead renounced Mrs Simpson, he would probably have moved on to the next married woman who took his fancy, then the next one after that. And if the present queen had decided to call it a day at 70, then King Charles III and his mistress would by now already be installed in ...”