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“... of the ritual, had he known about it, can only be a matter for speculation, but as recounted by Paul Ferris in Sir Huge the episode quaintly anticipates the row which has broken out over the publication of this biography, and brought such champions of Wheldon’s reputation as Sir Denis Forman, Ludovic Kennedy and Melvyn Bragg trumpeting into the ...”

“... from other sources than grief in no way invalidates the findings of the experiment. Had I been Paul Ferris, I should certainly have waited until Burton had popped his Gucci clogs: not only would such patience have been rewarded by an exponential expansion of the little-old-lady market (not to say the dirty-old-lady market), it might also have resulted ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously. In 1941, Larkin refers to Thomas coming to the English Club at Oxford: ‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices ...”

“... The narrator​ of Joshua Ferris’s new novel is a rich, white, garrulous, sexist, misanthropic New Yorker with a troubled childhood, now in early middle age, wondering what the point of it all is. But Paul O’Rourke has one redeeming feature: he’s a dentist. Which means that rather than pondering the mysteries of the universe and his place in it while staring into space, he instead thinks about the meaning of life, or more often the lack of it, as he’s peering into the brightly lit mouths of his patients: My last patient of the day was a five-year-old complaining of a loose tooth ...”

“... have employed darkness to set off a light show. Thus even in 1941, Spielberg’s only flop, the ferris wheel rolling down the pier, and the grid of lights of a city seen night (a motif also used in E.T.) from the low-flying fighter, remain memorable. And the little space-ships soaring over Richard Dreyfus’s car in Close Encounters are like animated Gabos ...”

“... theorised about how Jones might have used his hypnotic powers to gain control of Rice, but then Dr Ferris, principal of the School of Hypnotism, admitted that he could have been mistaken and that Jones might not have been a pupil after all. Undeterred, the Herald continued to run hypnotism stories. Jones was followed everywhere by the press, complaining after ...”

“... a framed still from a favourite film, A Hard Day’s Night; an essay by Eula Biss referring to Paul McCartney and ‘Norwegian Wood’; McCartney sporting a man bun during his lockdown vacation; rave reviews for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various ...”

“... labelled himself. But he could have escaped the legend to which he had devoted such energies. As Paul Ferris’s excellent biography established some time back, while Thomas was certainly in a bad way, his death was down to a medical blunder. He wasn’t martyred by the barbarians of the Inland Revenue: by the time he died Thomas was on the verge of ...”