“... obvious antecedent’, Degas’s Women in Front of a Café – which I had also put forward. Peter Wollen claims that the urban Sunlight on Brownstones depicts a place ‘not located in the city’. He can’t know Manhattan’s Upper West Side near Riverside Park, where Hopper liked to walk, looking for subjects. He states that ‘Hopper bought his ...”

“... were downright surreal. Before the 1997 general election, the Times – under the editorship of Peter Stothard and by this point driven almost mad by its antagonism towards Europe and its commensurate contempt for John Major – refused to endorse a party and instead chose to support whichever candidate was the most Eurosceptic in each constituency. The ...”

“... seminal address to the American Economic Association respectfully invoked. Yet this, for all its keen theoretical insights, evinces scepticism and caution about their immediate application to policy. It is in this respect curiously similar to Keynes’s General Theory, which it is often supposed, by readers unfamiliar with either text, to have superseded as ...”

“... been looking in the suitcase, I’ve been consulting other sources: my father’s younger brother, Peter, now a robust 86; family photographs; stamp albums; public records; other people’s suitcases; books; barely legible notes despatched to me by my mother, who has a macular hole and a keen memory and styles herself ...”

“... sometimes only a few pages apart, without seeming to register the discrepancy. On page 71 he is keen to see an execution – someone who saw Savonarola die at the stake isn’t frightened by blood or violence done to the body. Four pages later Enard recounts at length Michelangelo’s nightmare of being tortured and burned at the stake, until he wakes up in ...”

“... hesitantly into working-men’s establishments (but never into the sporting locker room). I was keen to learn what secret power plays he had discovered behind the closed doors of elite clubland. In fact there aren’t any, and he makes only a passing claim for the continuing political significance of clubs – for oligarchs and spies, apparently. Can this ...”

“... that the same Tories who believe in Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism should also be so keen on Iron Dukes. The second point, and the more Ravenesque, concerns the torrent of bullshit and redtape into which Labourism has intermittently plunged the country. In the case of post-1945 Austerity: ‘Everything about the class system was left intact ...”

“... the ring, he would always look like a killer. Or as he put it ‘I do not come to pitty-patty.’ Peter Heller’s biography of Tyson* is a blend of cool hyperbole and keen insight into the logic of the boxing business: matching your fighter with the right opponents, boosting his prestige by dosing his appearances, nudging ...”

“... of those ‘traditional social and cultural exclusions’ of which the new humanities men are so keen to discover unconscious traces in their predecessors. A self-made man of letters, Pritchett had none of the subsidies and privileges that post-war intellectuals came to expect the state and the university to shower on them. He found the Russian, French and ...”

“... for statehood jostled anxiously in the corridors alongside those who’d been formally invited, ‘keen as saints for a front seat on Judgment Day’. Into their midst glided a young, clever and passionately idealistic clerk from the Foreign Office, Harold Nicolson, who had left his wife in the arms of others but found consolation in dreams of the glorious ...”

“... casts on stable identities and notes the perplexing shifts in the characters’ emotions. His keen interest in the fluidity of the self, something explored by several of his favourite writers, returns again and again in his thoughts on late style, which are attentive to surprise changes of direction, to inconsistency, experiment, ‘anachronism and ...”

“... frauds and cruel extortions’, the inhumanity of serfdom and the instruments of torture in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. De Lacy Evans’s book presented Russia as a perfect autocracy, divided between slaves and masters, and focused exclusively on military expansion and colonisation.This image of barbaric absolutism gained greatly from the ...”

“... to their advertisers. But we can be sure all the same that we’ve become a number. Nguyen, a keen game-player himself, suggests a series of useful tests for distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy scoring systems. Good games deploy essentially arbitrary means of keeping score. Their measures of achievement exist not as ends in themselves but simply ...”

“... problems, such as those endured on the last of the Pink Panther movies. The CAA agent had got Peter Sellers three million dollars to do the film. He got Blake Edwards, who hated Sellers, the same amount (not to direct, but because he co-owned the rights). The agent also represented the scriptwriter, the director, and two of the producers. ‘It was about ...”

“... with him. The story goes that Schoenberg dismissed him, telling him he lacked an ear for harmony. Peter Yates’s book Twentieth-Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound (1968), reported Schoenberg as saying that Cage was ‘not a composer – but an inventor of genius’, a back-handed compliment that stuck ...”