“... before the war by the museum authorities at the behest of Saddam. Two days later, in the Guardian, David Aaronovitch seconded Cruickshank, and right-wing commentators in the US took up the story. Later that month, many of the same media figures used part of a statement by Donny George, the director of the Iraq Museum, to bury the story that had embarrassed the ...”

“... Tonight it’s memories of Mrs Thatcher and a real feast of humbug with Lords Butler, Tebbit and Bell joining in a chorus of self-serving reminiscence of their old mistress with the equally fawning commentary supplied by Matthew Parris. Thatcher’s was a court and her courtiers just as cowardly as the courtiers of Henry VIII, and one can imagine some ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... finding the experience particularly off-putting. That wasn’t true of some of their peers. David Bomberg, a far greater artist (his Ronda Bridge from 1935, reproduced here, leaps out from the page), would later exhibit with the AIA, but he was deeply unnerved by his own visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and kept his distance from the ...”

“... draped Art Deco dryads, fishbowl lights and heavy velvet curtains. The set was screaming for a David Lynch remake of The Masque of the Red Death. Room Three, Hotel Esperance, Finistère: a beacon of hope at the end of a darkening continent. But something embedded layers deep, mephitic and beyond redemption, was present in this city. All the coded signs ...”

“... by the new kinds of social and aesthetic domination, and by such bogus concepts as Clive Bell’s ‘significant form’. As Diarist, she had an assiduous zest for social goings-on of any kind, and for the places where things were happening. But she had the snob’s fatal lack of independence, of the ability, essential to most good writers, to get on ...”

“... saw fit to print – based on the texts of the 1846 and 1850 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell and the 1847 Wuthering Heights – is that it encourages us to read the poems and the novel in the order of their composition. O’Gorman, a strong proponent of the view that Gondal is the ‘key’ to Emily’s imagination, is quick to point to the much ...”

“... based Holmes’s deductive abilities on those of a real doctor, the surgeon Joseph Bell.) Nonetheless, the hero-in-two-persons arrangement is vestigially present in many cyclically narrated comics. Probably the best-loved example is the duality of Snoopy and Charlie Brown. Snoopy, the romantic ‘hero’, is variously an attorney, a pulp ...”

“... in its detail: undergraduates on night fire-watching duty taking turns to stay awake in the bell tower of Christ Church, the smell of blackout curtains, the ominous poetry of the blackout itself, the eight-second interval between trucks in a military convoy, with a press of bicycles behind the last one. This section is written in the first ...”

“... for the fish in the pond above. Of the chapel at Crimplesham Hall they write: ‘A tall spidery bell-tower is all there at first appears to be; but further inspection reveals a rather substantial building so encrusted with ivy and creeper that it is hard to make out the overall shape.’ As the DOE and the National Trust have stripped ivy and owls from any ...”

“... professes a sympathy, intentionally puts himself in extreme situations, then writes about them. David Foster Wallace (to whom Zambreno doesn’t relate) in his fiction seemingly did not. So when Keeler, offended by Zambreno’s appropriation of the identities of these women, asks, ‘at what point does recognising feminine likeness turn into an erasure, a ...”

“... We won’t find, for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by ...”

“... John had a marvellously dry sense of humour and always a pithy comment, ever an academic. Nigel Bell John and I had worked together, off and on, for I suppose more than twenty years both at the TLS and the LRB and I grew to admire him hugely for his learning, wit and humour. First I was his editor and then he was my editor and I enjoyed both ...”

“... that she, quite early on, had allowed herself to be talked into a ‘trivial’ affair with Clive Bell. Desmond, whose own early dalliances were theoretically intense but not physically consummated (all the girls liked him far too much for that to be allowed to spoil it), was probably far more upset by this than he admitted. The outcome, at any rate, was that ...”

“... of The Child in Time, for example, Ian McEwan lists Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies, David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child. In Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis acknowledges, among a number of others, Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, Lawrence Shainberg’s Brain Surgeon and ‘the works of ...”