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“... century there were Caravat and Shanavest pubs, wren-boys, mummers’ teams, songs and dance tunes. Nicholas Hanley, chief of the Caravats, was a flamboyant dandy who strutted about with a blunderbuss and brace of pistols, returned to his plundered victims any items he thought it beneath his dignity to pocket, and ostentatiously threw his elegant cravat to the ...”

“... And by doing so, these critics proved it was so. They wrote as if Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray et al were as sophisticated and as consistent in their styles, worldviews, personal ‘signatures’ as, say, William Faulkner – and thanks to Cahiers, few cinephiles would today think of disputing that. They were, however, less successful in their ...”

“... the happiest of his relationships with a major director, though he did remarkable work for Nicholas Ray (Born to Be Bad, On Dangerous Ground), Fritz Lang (Clash by Night) and Jean Renoir (The Woman on the Beach). Lieutenant Benson is fighting in Korea because he has to, and the progress of his platoon is by inches, through a mined road and enemy ...”

“... Sir​ Nicholas Henderson was British ambassador almost everywhere that mattered – Bonn, Paris, Washington. He met all the great personalities of the second half of the 20th century. Yet in conversation he reverted, time and again, to the few years he spent in his twenties as assistant private secretary to Ernest Bevin ...”

“... are one reason (Blade Runner is another) why Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? remains Dick’s best-known book, despite the baldness of its prose: ‘“Do you think androids have souls?” Rick interrupted.’ Do Androids? is also a book about authentic feeling, about how and when we can trust our emotions. Deckard and his wife own a ‘mood ...”

“... to the point of eccentricity’. Certainly that is the reputation which has stuck to his best-known predecessor, Henry George. In his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty, George set out the same thumping principle which inspires Linklater: ‘The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political ...”

“... lately comes up frozen quite stiff.This love of chaos, motion, process, which is the energy of his best poems, and often makes them resemble action paintings, is brought to a halt by the strong stresses on the last three words so that the stretched perception is completed. And there is a heightened exultation in chaos in a much later letter (23 October ...”

“... so quiet.’ ‘Just hanging on,’ Armstrong replied, ‘and punching.’ It was Collins who best described the three men: they were ‘amiable strangers’, never close. Aldrin was known as Dr Rendezvous for his habit at parties of droning on about the technical detail of the lunar module, named Eagle, for the Apollo 11 mission, and the way it would ...”

“... of literary names rarely turn out to exemplify general tendencies. For some realist writers the best names are invisible. Henry James was a great fretter over names, as you might expect from someone who had the same names as his father, both of which could be interchangeably a surname or a first name. He wanted his characters’ names to have a tang of ...”

“... writers. Fortunately, he discovered in himself another talent, and under the pen-name of ‘Nicholas Blake’ published a series of commercially successful detective stories, the classic genteel-class literary genre of the interwar period. At this point, Day-Lewis seemed even more of a whole-hogger for ‘the Revolution’ than Auden and Spender ...”

“... the crushed ambitions.’ In September 1849, after breaking with Colet, Flaubert invited his two best friends, Du Camp and the playwright Louis Bouilhet, to Croisset for a reading of his finished work; it took 32 hours over four days. The listeners had promised they would not comment until the end, and when it finally came they told him that St Anthony was a ...”

“... life, he had to realise that his vocation was not a true one, and, again taking the second best, he married – preferring wedded restraint to religious celibacy. He became the model paterfamilias, ruling his family gently but firmly, teaching them all to love virtue and learning. Everybody’s advocate and a model judge, he is a splendid public ...”

“... he died at forty, probably of tuberculosis, he left his manuscript of English poems to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, leader of the spiritual community at Little Gidding, to publish or destroy as he saw fit. Ferrar found it worth publishing. What was George Herbert like? ‘Saintly’ is a misleading adjective: saints often have difficult personalities. The ...”

“... before Thatcher carried the vote of no confidence in Callaghan, she had commissioned her friend Nicholas Ridley to design a campaign of revenge on the mineworkers, and to ensure that all the arsenals and all the tactical designs were in place in advance. Nigel Lawson, who was later to cover himself with glory as Energy Secretary in this bannered ...”

“... of Anatomy, The Proscenium of Truth, The Catholic Medicine. Among his contemporaries Fludd was best known as a physician, though his election to the Royal College of Physicians in 1609 came after four years of controversy, mainly concerning his enthusiasm for the controversial ‘chymicall physick’ of Paracelsus. In his heyday he was a renowned ...”