“... that what he was looking at was a proper subject for ‘the powers of an English painter’. It took Brown 13 years to finish this ambitious picture. He endlessly packed and re-packed the picture to accommodate more thought, more observation, further depths of conviction. It was a painting that became a manifesto, a text to be read and learned from. The ...”

“... did run the Cambridge research unit in which the most notorious episodes of the double-helix story took place – the episodes that involved Crick and James Watson. Perutz’s role appears rather shady in Ferry’s account. As is fairly well known, Watson and Crick made use of unpublished data, from Rosalind Franklin’s rival group at King’s College ...”

“... personage, and his stance from the beginning was aggressively cocksure. He linked up with – or took over – a ‘discussion group’ of local poets, who called themselves the Fugitives and spent much of their time plotting a Deep South ‘revival’: in other words, or so it sometimes seemed, they wanted their parochial verses and short stories to be ...”

“... Temple only underscores the general acceptance of Jewish exceptionalism within the empire. Romans took note of the oddities of the Jewish diet, especially the avoidance of pork, and made jokes about cut penises and Jewish credulity. In the teeming capital the large population of Jewish aliens was relatively visible. When Cicero linked Syrians and Jews ...”

“... remember, though Hitler made it the staple of his rhetoric in the ironic plethora of voting that took place in its last year, that the republic lasted only 14 years, and of these just six, sandwiched between a murderous birth-period and the terminal catastrophe of the Great Slump, had a semblance of normality. The massive international interest in it is ...”

“... dates. I put, ‘William I, 1087-1066’. I could smell the aeroplane glue on his fingers as he took hold of my ear. I stood in the corner near the insect case, remembering my bike. I had the John Bull Puncture Repair Kit in my pocket: glass paper, rubber solution, patches, chalk and grater, spare valves. I was ‘riding ...”

“... as winning the Cold War, or the ‘war on terror’. One of the things that’s so good about John le Carré’s Cold War thrillers is their moral murkiness, as they explore what happens when the people playing the game lose sight of its ultimate purpose, as they all inevitably do, and begin to play for the game’s own sake. Le Carré’s overripe ...”

“... for a minute or two. Who is responsible? Are the bloke and the body connected? Is either of them John Bayley? Rimington is an interesting figure and an amusing journalist. She knows a good bit about spooks obviously, and a good bit about spook fiction. She can’t bear 007: Bond ‘has about as much to do with the intelligence profession as Billy Bunter has ...”

“... of migration via the experience of an Afghan refugee waiting to enter Britain, Harding also took us through its philosophical dimensions. Two contrasting approaches, ‘communitarian’ and ‘cosmopolitan’, fight it out. The former ‘proposes a bounded, particular set of priorities and interests’, typically national or ethnic; the latter, ‘a ...”

“... ranks. The section labelled ‘The Exhibition Watercolour’ shows what happened when the medium took on oil painting head to head. White paper disappears, subject matter becomes more dramatic. Here you have Turner’s mountain landscape The Battle of Fort Rock, Val d’Aouste, Arthur Melville’s The Blue Night, Venice, in which a luminous sky of midnight ...”

“... in Amritsar. More menacingly, over 180 Labour MPs signed a motion in 1973 for the dismissal of Sir John Donaldson. Donaldson, then a High Court judge and president of the National Industrial Relations Court, later master of the rolls, had sequestrated £100,000 held in the political fund of the Amalgamated Engineering Union as a penalty for contempt of ...”

“... consciousness to her 17th-century work without violating its historical dimension. I’m sure John Broadbent spotted this very rare quality in her when he invited her to edit parts of the Cambridge Milton in the early 1970s. I can remember the intense, tortuous, day-long arguments – inevitably in the kitchen, but this time our Norwich kitchen in St ...”

“... to enter his enclosure, and slides around in his own darkness. Exactly 146 interviews later, John le Carré, our premier narrative spook-meister, exhibits, by his own admission, that knack whereby the memory fails and the lie takes over. There is something in his tone that advises us not to believe him too much. The interview ...”

“... who was having a terrible struggle with the heat on an excursion during which he not uncommonly took a portrait nine times before getting a good negative, struck gold in Bhopal, where the Begum joined in the photographic game with enthusiasm, dressing herself, her daughter and members of her household in all manner of costumes so that he could ‘get ...”

“... in by Carl André, while Samuel Beckett endlessly redistributes 16 stones among four pockets, and John Cage copies a star-atlas onto music paper. In the messier room across the hall, Karlheinz Stockhausen untunes a synthesiser, while William Burroughs randomly folds and cuts up his prose, and Robert Rauschenberg pushes a stuffed goat through an old tyre. That ...”