Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?

Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

"Nationwide" featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.