“... interest the Sunday Times, where I was then working. There was another guest, an aristocratic young man from the City whose role appeared to be that of prompting the MI5 officer – for that is what I took the man from ‘the office’ to be – when he hesitated over a real or pretended indiscretion. The conversation was all to do with the extent to ...”

“... may secretly yearn to ascribe to them. Toasting the engagement of the BBC’s man in the region, Roger Hearing, with a bottle of champagne which, a proud best man, I had resourcefully procured one night, I swallowed hard as he told me of witnessing killings at Rwandan Government checkpoints in the first days of the crisis ‘There was no passion. It was like ...”

“... But although his air of superiority, or his superiority, annoyed or hurt some people when he was young in Cambridge and Ceylon, and later as well, he obviously grew much more tolerant as time went on, as befitted his adherence to socialist doctrines which he might call peculiar but which seem entirely honourable, sincere and considered. Still, there remained ...”

“... posed in the studio. The subjects are deceit and seduction: one (known only from copies) shows a young cavalier being taught how to cheat at cards; in another a young cavalier has his palm read, and ring removed, by a pretty gypsy girl. These pictures were enormously influential, creating a whole new class of cabinet ...”

“... my mother was as I had never seen her, incredibly beautiful. Getting married, to a handsome young man in the schmatter trade. But under the beauty, her eyes shone steely. She was on her way. It was uncanny. The beauty and the cold eyes. This was her last chance, handing me over to a slightly famous writer. There were possibilities, but also the ...”

“... novels, but the mood has grown nastier. Brenda hooks up with Beaver, an indifferent and snobbish young man who is universally deplored and whom even Brenda recognises as second-rate, and demands a divorce. The beau monde is charmed by so fantastic a romance, and a broken Tony seeks to be obliging; but after various humiliations he puts his foot down and ...”

“... and torture are daily events, and a military coup seems to be in the offing. Galip, a young lawyer whose speciality is defending political prisoners, returns home to find that his wile Rüya has left him. His instinctive response is to pretend that nothing has happened – Rüya is simply too ill to leave the apartment or come to the telephone. He ...”

“... saw that this was indeed ‘only a façade’, but it’s one that Christopher Banks, the young English detective who is the starchy narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, can’t see behind. He remembers leaving Shanghai as a boy with the discomfiting feeling that the city might never reveal the mystery of his mother and father’s strange ...”

“... that a precarious balance must be kept. As the person walks (or sails, or climbs, or swims like Roger Deakin in the delightfully graphic and immediate Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain), mental notes will inevitably be scribbling themselves; the telling will be flawed if the impulse of the journey is merely to fulfil a book ...”

“... not a good-time girl (except in the sense that she just wanted a good time like any healthy young thing) but a pawn – no, that’s pawn – in the Cold War. Stephen Ward, you may recall, was osteopath to the great and good. There was almost no one in society he didn’t massage. When he wasn’t manipulating them, he was sketching them, having ...”

“... of the scenes take place in Julia’s bedroom, where sex and emotional grievances unfold. As a young woman, Julia worked for a short time in a hotel in Dublin. ‘It never struck her as incongruous that the life most of her friends lived was very far removed from the religious sentiments they professed.’ She falls in love with an American who eventually ...”

“... more than a week of protests. The activists decide to disperse, but a mural remains at the site: a young girl with a spade has just planted a sapling; she is holding a plant label with the XR logo, an hourglass in a circle. The piece, which has all the distinguishing features of a Banksy, borrows a line from Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life ...”

“... within it seem both realistic and safe. No possible turn of a Ransome story would allow John, Roger, Susan and Titty to be embarrassed by their mother’s breasts showing through a tight sweat shirt. Many heroes are a cut above Adrian in talent. K.M. Peyton’s Pennington is a rough diamond and gets into trouble with the police, but he is also a concert ...”

“... literature; others called it ‘anecdote’, which sounded trivial. Clark has not gone as far as Roger Fry, who considered that the superior way of looking at Raphael’s Transfiguration was to forget that it represented anything, so that one could engage more easily in the ‘pure contemplation of the spatial relations of plastic volumes’. He has never ...”

“... through rhythms of highlights and darks. The canvas should be analogous to greater ensembles: as Roger de Piles wrote, establishing the principle in 1708, ‘All the world’s entities tend to unity … just as politics refers everything to the government of a state.’ A centred composition might thus have statist resonances, serving as a rebuke to ...”