“... his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him, and his course towards us was marked by a white foam a rod in width, which he made with the continual violent thrashing of his tail; his head was about half out of water, and in that way he came upon, and again struck the ship. This time the bow was stove in, and the whale, pumping its tail in a froth ...”

“... backed off and charged again, while the nanny waited nearby, a seemingly dispassionate spectator. Peter Coates’s study of the evolving meanings of ‘nature’, in Europe and North America, is preoccupied with the human tendency to invade nature, altering, exploiting and ‘reinventing’ it. He culls a telling image from the Guardian for 9 August ...”

“... can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been thinking about for a long time. In 1979 he published his first novel, Kindergarten, a short and desolate work which won the Hawthornden Prize. A meditation on ‘Hansel and Gretel’, the grimmest of tales, Kindergarten describes a world ...”

“... On the front cover of The Battle for Bermondsey there is a photograph of Peter Tatchell as, I imagine, he would like to be seen: a steady innocent gaze, a determined tilt to the chin, a youthful crusading air. He looks fragile but brave. In the background, slightly out of focus, is an older comrade looking decidedly askance, not to say horrified ...”

“... its line, finishing rightwards of where it began; saw that his side-whiskers were so spare that white skin showed through. His father was not old, Bill remembered, as he registered also the slenderness hugged by his shirt, the spread of his thighs on the seat, even the flex of his finger as it drummed on the upper part of his arm. He had been barely 19 when ...”

“... shadowy backgrounds, hands clutched to throats, legs tottering beneath spindly trunks, follicles white with the ‘horror of life’. In fact, this was often how they saw themselves. Disease may be the great leveller, the only effective manifestation of the democratic spirit, but for these men it often became a sign of grace and unique destiny. The 19th ...”

“... forward-leaning man with his back to you draw you into an imagined space, your eye turns to the white tablecloth which their gestures seem to measure and enclose. You now have a quite different picture to attend to – a still life of food. There is bread, a basket of fruit, a roast fowl, a glass of wine, a jug and a carafe. In the later painting, Christ is ...”

“... off, and mixed bold and light, serifed and sans serif characters in single words. He left a lot of white space, words often ran up or down the page, and big type was often mixed with very small photographs. These devices slowed readers down. Readers who persevered became initiates. His layouts were a rejection of the conservative traditions which still govern ...”

“... forty-year-old often skint but always cadging mother, Helen. Other characters were added later. Peter, the louche businessman with a ‘wallet full of reasons’ to lure Helen offstage and into a brief marriage for the play’s middle sections. Jimmie, the charming ‘coloured naval rating’ who keeps Jo company over Christmas and leaves her pregnant. And ...”

“... The Austrian writer Peter Handke is so successful and so prolific that, reviewing one of his recent novels, his arch-enemy Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ended by crowing at the fact that Langsame Heimkehr bad failed to make it onto the best-seller list. ‘Let no one say there’s no such thing as progress,’ he concluded ...”

“... Standard. ‘Sir Richard Hopkins was warned and the “Treasury view” no longer appeared in the White Paper as fundamental and decisive, taken by itself, as Winston Churchill had made it appear in his Budget statement.’ Instead, the objections were dressed up in a great deal of administrative detail, designed to deflect attention from the central ...”

“... of composition, figures and faces (or parts of them) appear in these borderlands. In The White Tablecloth (1926) a scrap of grey profile; in Dining Room overlooking the Garden (1930-31) three-quarters only of Marthe’s face is made even harder to register by the trellis pattern of the wallpaper. Cut-off figures (Bonnard’s way of doing them is much ...”

“... They are heavily stage-managed affairs, and nearly all, like this one, involve four middle-aged, white, male executives up on a platform, balancing precariously on bar stools. The men were wearing open-necked shirts and too-tight blue suits, and it was evident that their desperate 5 a.m. Peloton sessions were failing to hold back the paunches acquired by ...”

“... us no comment of his own on the story he has to tell – just the facts: no speculation as to why Peter Sutcliffe behaved as he did, just the events, the family life, anecdotes that may or may not be pertinent, the pubs and their atmosphere. And we go back, or rather from the beginning of the book we go forward – from Sutcliffe’s grandparents on both ...”

“... Brassaï to take in 1939 show him in a well-lit studio wearing what looks like a doctor’s white coat, sitting close to Wilma Javor, the young woman he is drawing. Clothed old men drawing naked young women are one of Picasso’s subjects, even though Picasso didn’t spend much time working that way; Matisse did. You could guess this – and also ...”