“... But I do not know that this connection did A.J.P. Taylor very much good – any more than it did Michael Foot, Harold Nicolson, Robert Bruce-Lockhart, Tom Driberg or any of the other literati who seem to have lost a dimension in the service of that heterogeneous collection of unlikeable lost causes that Beaverbrook picked up. Taylor wrote that the Express ...”

“... quantity, and more for observation than vision. But in 1927, 45 years after Trollope’s death, Michael Sadleir published a reassessment. He argued that Trollope was a writer with the rare gift of being able to produce memorable books without writing memorable sentences, and probe depths without seeming to move beyond the surface. Interest revived; the ...”

“... to cast sharp shadows, with the sky blue except for occasional reefs of cloud so that with the snow still lying in drifts on the road earth and heaven seem one. 23 January. To the National where I watch the matinée of The Habit of Art. It’s a sharp and energetic performance, matinée audiences often the best and today’s helped because there are ...”

“... of human activity and contact, silting up in vast unchartable archives. In Repeated Takes, Michael Chanan has written a concise history of the technology that has wrought this change and the commercial and creative forces that have shaped it. His account is elegant and impressively well-informed. He ranges across the entire technical field, from ...”

“... especially defenders of the ‘Third World’ and its hopes, from C.L.R. James and Edward Said to Michael Gilsenan, more or less uniformly find him and his attitudes troubling and sometimes bigoted. He is portrayed as a self-hater and Uncle Tom, a product of the sorts of complex that Frantz Fanon diagnosed. On the other side are the conservative writers ...”

“... of committees and research teams, of mandarins and boffins, as depicted in the novels of C.P. Snow (the original for at least one of whose characters is in this book) and in sundry Sampsonian Anatomies of Britain, which is commemorated in this volume. Here is an official prosopography of official Britain: civil servants write about civil ...”

“... partner and natural outlet – she had recorded the moment when, after clearing a path through the snow to ‘the necessary’ outside Dove Cottage, he had proudly summoned her to view it, and been promptly drenched by a fresh fall from the roof. And yet she had also faithfully followed her brother’s road to social respectability, brought about as much as ...”

“... wave’ science fiction, a quasi-modernist movement centred on New Worlds and figures such as Michael Moorcock, who took over from Carnell as the magazine’s editor in 1964, and M. John Harrison, who became its literary editor in 1968.Ballard’s own fiction was by then moving into its second major phase. This followed a second life-defining trauma. In ...”

“... met his family there, while my eight-year-old daughter was marvelling at his masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It seems strange that an artist such as Jeff Koons can include a gigantic puppy dog in his repertoire, to massive acclaim, while Sandaldjian’s minute Disney figures are admired only by a tiny group of cognoscenti. After all, as ...”

“... of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin. As for London and Scottish Marine Oil’s Chris ...”

“... street’ is disfigured because the figure has gone but also because of the bombing. Just as snow has ‘disfigured’ the public statues in the third line of Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, now shrapnel – ‘the dead leaves still rattled on like tin’ – disfigures the street in Eliot’s poem.In earlier drafts, Eliot included the line ...”

“... started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather pudgy face. The Farouk ...”

“... same year, the Daily Herald reported on an encouraging experiment recently carried out in France: snow ploughs had been fitted to a tank, which had then proved capable of clearing a ten-foot-wide path through the drifts blocking a mountain road. This Christian socialist paper also offered its readers an improving story about Krupp, the vast German armaments ...”

“... first time I saw, or looked repeatedly at, a painting by Frank Auerbach was in the art historian Michael Podro’s living room – it must have been in 1968. The painting was Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning. I’d barely heard of Auerbach at that point (modern painting for me was French and American), and I certainly didn’t have a clue who had done the ...”

“... his father’s throne, who, like an evil queen in a fairy tale demanding strawberries be picked in snow, counts on his rival dying in the attempt. Jason builds the Argo, gathers together a band of heroes and sets out for the Black Sea. Medea differs from other tragic heroes and heroines, from Oedipus or Antigone or Hecuba or Jason himself, in that she is the ...”