“... the building except in the bars, restaurants and ‘any other situation where the dignity of MEPs may be compromised’. So I proposed to film Farage as he went to collect his moolah from the allowances office. As he opens the door, he turns to me and says: ‘Come and film this, it’s a feeding frenzy in here.’ But just as I’m about to do so, a French ...”

“... efforts to reinvent a British tradition of patriotic, elite paternalism were heavily influenced by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level, with its strange subtitle, ‘Why Equality Is Better for Everyone’. Its underlying assumption was that inequality could only be tackled by an appeal to the rationality and self-interest of those ...”

“... or reflections of walls or trees’. The crowded inner city setting of Gutter Lane may not have offered this luxury – in 1600 he complained that ‘the lights thereof [were] darkened by the annoyance of one of the next neighbours’ building.’ The scrupulous cleanliness of the studio, ‘where neither dust, smoke, noise nor stench ...”

“... him how to look at painting. Though still in high school, Bois is swept up by the events of May 1968, after which he connects radical art with radical politics whenever he can, an avant-garde commitment that is affirmed when he meets the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark two years later. In 1969, aged seventeen, Bois is offered an opportunity to exhibit his ...”

“... These images, which astonished the Surrealists-to-be when they were first shown in Paris in May 1921, provided the basic template for the Surrealist picture, even for painters as visually different as René Magritte. While Surrealist images were sometimes patterned on screen memories, Surrealist objects were often modelled on sexual fetishes, which, in ...”

“... reads this, or as he would probably prefer to say, if he has this ‘drawn to his attention’, he may care to know that more than one of the guests gave me separate but identical accounts of his conduct at this soirée. He evidently has a knack of inspiring affection and loyalty in his friends.) Now, I am merely a lone scribe living on my depleted wits. Do I ...”

“... true that he has found himself in this position by a mixture of chance and opportunism. The same may apply to much of the contemporary Russian political establishment, but he, more than most, has exploited a difficult situation with great skill and ruthlessness. It is now clear that the challenge he mounted to the Presidency, and the counter-challenge ...”

“... the combined effect of thousands of tiny perceptual connections, microscopic hooks and eyes. His may be the first prose style to be influenced by Velcro. The self-enclosure of his narrators (Baker has yet to risk a third person) is very striking. A surprising amount could be conveyed about the books in which they appear by renaming them, as if they were ...”

“... of its own dynamic or the causes of its own crises’. While the turn to ‘British history’ may be motivated by waning English confidence, however, many Irish and Scottish historians interpret it as a form of intellectual colonialism. Having dismantled Whig and Marxist explanations of political change in England, revisionists like Conrad Russell make ...”

“... the US Marine headquarters overnight on 22-23 October after attending a pop concert. These points may seem trivial, but inattention to detail has been one of the most salient and devastating features of US policy in the Middle East – as Mr Bradlee’s book makes clear. It was not really surprising that North and his colleagues in Washington sometimes seemed ...”

“... even very recently, was attached to any admitted departure from sexual regularity. The fact that Richard Crossman lost an Oxford fellowship for having a divorce, and was not the last fellow to do so, is one which is now received with general incredulity. The fact that it is now perfectly safe, for example, for a couple to admit that they live together when ...”

“... that his thoughts strayed to ‘popsies’ even while working hard on the structure of DNA; Richard Feynman enjoyed having himself photographed playing the bongos, and, like Kary Mullis, broadcast his enthusiasm for topless bars: ‘When my calculations didn’t work out,’ Feynman said, ‘I would watch the girls.’ Mullis just rides the wave farther ...”

“... architects to think there was anything for them in new Tube stations besides the ‘fit-out’. As Richard MacCormac, whose firm has designed the new Southwark Station, put it: ‘the engineers design the system, then the architects dress it up. Was it just a matter of deciding which tiles to put on the platform walls?’ When Paoletti started looking for ...”

“... gone to Saudi Arabia, leaving a broken marriage behind? One or other of her conversation partners may be responsible. There are brief excursions from the central dialogues: one to the old lady’s husband, Robert, who hears a susurrus of women’s voices in his flat in Positano. Beneath the old woman’s bedroom, by a convex mirror (whose symbolism is ...”

“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”