“... talent for making viscerally real what was for many readers the abstraction of slavery. As David Blight puts it in his excellent new biography, he ‘learned how to leave them weeping’.But the Narrative’s publication also threatened Douglass’s safety. He was still a slave who could legally be recaptured – easily, since the book identified him ...”

“... in the company of a boy, smaller and younger than ourselves, a fragile boy with ginger hair called David. I think we thought of him as ‘our boy’. We bossed him. Occasionally, when he didn’t walk straight or carry our bags or speak when we wanted him to, we’d slap him or hit his hands with a ruler. We had to pass through fields to get to school, with ...”

“... of Crossman’s on the opposite side. In Parliament, he was overtaken by younger men – George Brown, Jim Callaghan, even Denis Healey. When Labour returned to power in 1964, he was given the important, but hardly central, office of President of the Board of Trade. Three years later, he was brutally and unceremoniously sacked. Since then, he has hung on in ...”

“... of SIS, and – most of all – the uniforms of East German dinginess: the white socks and brown shoes that ‘Smith’ wears, the ‘hand-me-down Marlene’ clothes worn by ‘Michaela’, the cheap synthetic track-suits of the former Stasi officers. It comes as no surprise that when Markus Wolf strolls into these pages he is tall and ...”

“... particular, without whose endorsement the assent of the people cannot be assured. If either Gordon Brown or Tony Blair needs to summon the British electorate out of their armchairs in order finally to see the other off, then he will. But otherwise we probably shouldn’t wait by the phone. The Daily Mail has taken advantage of this hiatus in the high politics ...”

“... to put together an anthology of Parliamentary applications for Private Eye’s Order of the Brown Nose would stumble before long on an obsequious supplementary question from David Evans, one of the very first Tories to make a million out of privatisation (in his case from rubbish collection). Again and again, at Prime ...”

“... frequently); others where what is special is an eerie suburban ordinariness (David Lynch’s small-town America). Doig’s landscapes, to a greater degree than most you might include in an anthology of painted and filmed scenery, suggest a surprising discovery about to be made, rather than something that’s been imposed on an amenable ...”

“... is a serious exhibition.1 The pictures themselves signal it with heavy colour: first, black, grey, brown, mud and rust, and, in later pictures strong reds and yellows (when he could afford it – earth colours are cheap). Thick paint – in early pictures so thick that it seems to parody all its Expressionist precursors – and wide strokes add weight to the ...”

“... In some cases the viewer becomes like the figure that stands dwarfed in the foreground of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, which is reproduced in the catalogue alongside Kleist’s reaction to it: ‘It was like someone having their eyelids cut off.’ Even landscape can be painfully revealing. The German connection is important, but if one lists ...”

“... years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his system. Whatever his reasons, he tries to discover in this well-crafted memoir, which is effectively a joint biography of his parents and himself – a difficult undertaking ...”

“... and demeanour, going so far as to caption one photograph: ‘Sofia Marie changed her dark brown hair to blonde because it looks more angelic’. Mass communications, and their prime instrument, the photograph, have proved crucial in the history of supernatural phenomena. The Martin sisters had a plate camera in the convent and passed happy hours of ...”

“... from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now. The extent of the continued underfunding of the public ...”

“... and local tycoon. Recently, however, she has taken up with Gavin (‘slenderly-featured’ with ‘brown, black-lashed eyes’). She tells Attercliffe she is giving up Gavin and leaving Maurice. She is coming back to Walton Lane to live with her children and without Attercliffe. Attercliffe disagrees. They have an argument. It is the first of several similar ...”

“... was the occasion on which Eliot, at Pound’s behest, delivered a parcel containing a pair of old brown shoes to a distinctly unappreciative James Joyce. The shoes apart, Eliot was having a good time. He considered Lewis the most profitable person he had had to talk to for a long time. In Saumur, Lewis fell off his bicycle, and was soon looking for someone to ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”