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“... A good lad, Christopher, a tad pensive, or watchful, for one so young.A bookworm too, if ever there was one: perhaps a career in lawor some sort of scholarly pursuit or other, but surely a hopeless fitfor the give and take of Fleet Street or the City or as an estate agent.Still, a well-behaved and temperate child, pleasant enough company,but just this very moment struggling, and failing, to squelch a giggle10,000 feet above the Persian Gulf in one of only eleven seatson a de Havilland 104 Dove, which will presently be passingover the rocky terrain, salt pans and limestone formations of Qatar,beginning its descent only fifteen minutes after having taken off,the hydraulic whine of the landing gear making ready to extend ...”

“... Then, rather oddly, he complained at having his ‘Strategic Defence Initiative’ nicknamed Star Wars. Defending his inventive tax-reform bill, and challenging the Democrats to make something of it, he gurgled: ‘Make my day!’ But comparisons between his style and that of Dirty Harry are daily discouraged by a pained, overworked White House press ...”

“... is strongly linked to television. Between 1972 and 1982, his TV column was one of the Observer’s star turns, bringing a sharp comic intelligence to bear on trash as well as quality broadcasts and generating four books of selected pieces. He also worked as a part-time TV performer, conducting interviews, doing self-scripted monologues, taking part in ...”

“... standard move, and when Gates wants to create a more likeable male ironist – like Billy in ‘Star Baby’, the most effective story in The Wonders of the Invisible World, who’s seen giving ‘his best imitation of a guileless smile’ – he makes the character gay, perhaps to take the edge of eccentric wilfulness off his advanced sense of camp. Willis ...”

“... true Jacobin’ (and he was thinking of himself) as someone ‘who had seen the evening star set over a poor man’s cottage, and connected it with the hope of human happiness’. It was, he admitted, a pastoral definition and he could offer others less romantic. But his ability to harmonise his radicalism and his imagination is instructive. To make ...”

“... mostly – and for a long time Shepard had also been hampered by his dreams of becoming a rock star. He played in a band, the Holy Modal Rounders, and his early plays often required their casts to ‘do the frug onstage’. Character, his actors were instructed, should be treated ‘in terms of collage construction or jazz improvisation’; and there was a ...”

“... that most novelists rely on. His first few books – even the famously impenetrable Ratner’s Star (1976), about decoding an alleged message from outer space in a top-secret complex in an unnamed distant country – are broadly black-farcical. The impression they leave is of a handful of brilliantly managed sketches spliced together with jump-cuts and ...”

“... Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a translation’s merit should be judged by ‘its effect as an English poem’, since Johnson was talking about translations, whereas Logue’s poem is a variety of ‘poetical imitation’ and belongs to a perfectly good tradition of English poems based on or played off against an older (often Classical) original ...”

“... proposition that the sexes are identical. In the film of Henry James’s The Bostonians, Superman-star Christopher Reeves looks deeply into the eyes of the suffragette heroine and drawls, ‘Yo’re made for prah-vacy,’ and she is convinced. She opts for a world of personal value. The real-life case of Gertrude Stein was somewhat different. With only ...”

“... to pay for a medal. There is always an expectant whisper followed by a saleroom hush when the star turn is introduced at an auction. James Grist is the auctioneers’ stamp expert at the Westbury Hotel sale. He introduces Lot 770 – the last of the day – over the mahogany lectern: ‘This lot opens in the room at £31,000.’ In no time at all it ...”

“... Writing in the Tablet in 1951, Evelyn Waugh described Christopher Isherwood as the best of those British writers who had ‘captured’ the Thirties. It was not, Waugh being Waugh, high praise. Auden he felt to be a mysterious cove comprehensible only to his pals (among whom Waugh did not number himself). Stephen Spender, Waugh declared, had been granted at birth all the fashionable literary neuroses but his fairy godmother ‘quite forgot the gift of literary skill ...”

“... little he could do about Tintin in the Congo, and he made only superficial changes to The Shooting Star, switching the chief baddie’s name from Blumenstein to Bohlwinkel and his base of operations from New York to ‘Sao Rico’. (He maintained that he hadn’t known that Blumenstein might be construed as a Jewish name when he attached it to an ...”

“... when I saw a poster facing me. Executed in yellow and black, it was a combined logo featuring the Star of David, the Islamic star and crescent, the Roman Catholic cross and the more elaborate cruciform of the Serbian and Bosnian Orthodox. Gens una summus,read the superscription. ‘We are one people’. Here, rendered in ...”

“... pirate broadcaster. An attractive young woman reminisces enthusiastically about Guattari’s rock-star reception at a French philosophy conference three years earlier, though it seems that ‘that young guy in a white shirt’ nearly got beaten up. (BHL, not by chance, is in Bologna now too, but ‘in order to pass incognito’ he is wearing a black ...”

“... is a flash of light and they find themselves floating up into a space ship, ‘juss lyke bleedin Star Trax’. Aliens (which ‘smel a petrol, sweets, bernin mettle & dog shit’) subject them to strange experiments. A high-pitched sound makes The Sarge bleed from the eyes, nose and mouth, while Blakie is first zapped with rays that seem to cook him from the ...”