“... Congo linking Joseph Conrad (who improved his English by reading the Lowestoft newspapers) with Roger Casement (whom Conrad much admired for his integrity), Sebald remarks on the ‘distinctive ugliness’ of Belgium and the stunted growth of its inhabitants. On one visit to Brussels he encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than he would normally come ...”

“... middle-aged, rubber-gloved, white-coated man is shown carefully sticking a needle into a young naked girl, who turns away in an attitude of despair (she is actually part of an oil painting suffering from blisters). Over the girl’s belly, in red letters, we read ‘Foreword by Sir Ernst Gombrich’. ‘Mrs Walden,’ Gombrich remarks, ‘clearly ...”

“... of Apollinaire, Picasso, André Salmon and Max Jacob were drawn to Jarry, who lived fast, died young and left an unbeautiful corpse, more or less suicided by poverty and drink at 34 (the autopsy indicated tuberculous meningitis, but it was absinthe that did him in). This grim end only added to his posthumous allure. The Dadaists claimed him as a ...”

“... the argument, as if it is meant to be emphatic, but which by itself seems hardly worth saying. ‘Young people appear then to have been more promiscuous... than married adults.’ Even allowing for all kinds of cultural change, that seems always likely to have been (on average) true. So what is this book trying to tell us? That some things never ...”

“... were sceptical that readers could cope with his ‘bottomless et cetera’, Barthelme’s editor, Roger Angell, knew that what kept them coming back was the brilliant unexpectedness of the conceit or assemblage.The 1950s and 1960s were a great era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For ...”

“... exerted control over both MI 5 and the Secret Service.’ About a third of the book deals with Sir Roger Hollis, Director-General of MI 5 from 1956 to 1965, who fell under suspicion in the 1960s and early 1970s because of ‘two hundred examples of Soviet bloc penetrations’ of British Intelligence. Two other very senior officers also came under suspicion ...”

“... a straightforward conspiracy between the Home Secretary (Henry Brooke), the head of MI5 Sir Roger Hollis, and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (Sir Joseph Simpson), to ‘shut Ward up’. It is a serious charge. But Knightley, one of the most experienced and reliable investigative reporters in this country, and Caroline Kennedy, are sure of ...”

“... so are grace, nobility and even the kindness that comes close to being flattery. ‘Van Dyck,’ Roger de Piles noted, ‘took his time to draw a face when it had its best looks on.’ He painted Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, as a handsome woman – without, it would seem, losing the likeness. Yet her niece, who knew her first from the painting, was ...”

“... investigators during the last three decades of the 19th century, the period dealt with in Roger Luckhurst’s study. Photography was of inestimable importance in disseminating the performance of the mediums, as well as offering a deep metaphor for the relation between external matter and immaterial thought. While the interplay between psychology and ...”

“... and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with the old Masters’. He was ambitious and keen to be liked, but socially difficult. A photo survives of a Slade ...”

“... a couple of months later, in 2011, my first husband, father of my daughter, and my oldest friend, Roger. Then, during the final quarter of 2013, there were two more deaths within a month of each other, neither of them really unexpected after years of frailty, but both, Doris Lessing and her son, Peter, having attachments of some complexity to each other, to ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1944, a young man was stopped at a checkpoint of the Pétainist milice outside the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro station. According to his identity card, he was Julien Keller, aged seventeen, a dyer, born in the département of the Creuse. The bag he was carrying contained dozens of other fake identity papers ...”

“... is enough to invoke, by conditioned reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in ...”

“... Weschke is looking down at his hands or the tablecloth, a woman lies slumped in an armchair and a young man holds his head in an attitude of total weariness. At the other side of the table, the poet W.S. Graham is holding forth. He sits bolt upright, stabbing the air with the fingers of one hand; it looks as though an electric shock is passing through his ...”

“... the reader’s sympathy into places it might not otherwise be led, as in this passage where a young West Indian describes the trials of early marriage and parenthood: we walkin out good till de firss baby come: bonnet pram bootie wettin de bed: evry body stannin rounn cooin like woo-dove: look how e favour e faddah they sayin: look e lil booee eye an e ...”