“... now seems like success. He and Bob Bell work out of the same office collating ‘Years Gone By’ or ‘The Country Day by Day’, duelling with bishops and others reluctant with copy. The common purpose of their lives is to resist the irresistible ebb of selfesteem. Dyson considers himself the victim of each possible ...”

“... and tomorrows in all their intersecting dimensions rates an ‘A’ for enterprise. It has yet to be matched by a comparable British academic study. But in their recital of events, interpretations of motives and judgments of what happened some of the 13 contributors could have done better. This is understandable. Setting ...”

“... you will have to go through very serious examinations. If you wish to pass them you must always be yourself. There is something crooked, something faulty about you. Don’t try to conceal it.’ ‘I am not going to conceal it.’ ‘And be good and kind. Always be good. All your ...”

“... personal contribution to that immense achievement should appear more considerable than is implied by the titular and public relations role that was sometimes attributed to him. When he went on to become President of the United States, he once more found himself described as a constitutional monarch rather than an executive leader. Yet in the perspective of an ...”

“... Nations now fighting there would have long since attempted to pull out ... Certainly we must be extremely wary and watchful of both sides. Of course, the fact remains that the probable enemy is the communists, but Rhee has been such an unsatisfactory ally that it is difficult indeed to avoid excoriating him in the strongest of terms. It is hard to read ...”

“... since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old problem. Can deliberate wounding be good sport? Scannell tells of dangerous, exciting weeks in the life of Dave Ruddock, a boxer from Leeds, acknowledged as Middleweight Champion of the World. ‘He had not lost a fight since he was 13 ... Schoolboy Champion of Great Britain, Junior ABA and ...”

“... and bigger than life, his enormous, holstered six-shooter set just below the eye-level of passers-by, welcoming travellers to Orange County. He used to straddle the entrance to the John Wayne International Airport; now, so as not to suffer the weatherbeaten fate of the original, the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter ...”

“... in such an obvious evil for so long, and how non-Europeans came successfully to resist it. By contrast, sections of the Right in this country insist on a version of history that will trumpet Empire’s positive achievements, not least out of a present-minded concern to stress that Britain’s role is global not European. The forthcoming Oxford History ...”

“... really photographic rather than architectural (and spatial)? And would such ‘contamination’ be a bad thing? Is it possible that the buildings themselves are complicitous, no longer offering the grand head-on, Neoclassical façades for simple reproduction (see, for example, the magnificent Richard Pare collection, Photography and Architecture ...”

“... Inspired by the bourgeois ‘bad taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed furniture, this aviary of china birds, these chiming clocks, garish oriental rugs and draped curtains could form the chosen, or at any rate tolerated, habitat of the austere master of unease ...”

“... through the novels of Faulkner, Dreiser and Updike. ‘All that matters is that his heart must be pure, and he must move forward to the quest which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search for the unfettered self.’ The ‘unfettered self’, or rather its expression in paint, was exactly what the makers of Abstract ...”

“... in Angelica Goodden’s words, ‘a warm and seductive romanticism’. Mrs William Chinnery is, by comparison, a little bland. Vigée Le Brun was at her best with romantic young girls and attractive men. The sublime was beyond her register: it is hard to take her picture of Madame de Staël strumming her lyre seriously, and when, late in life, she undertook ...”

“... When​ Britain left the EU on 31 January, led by a prime minister commanding a fresh eighty-seat majority in the House of Commons, a line (of sorts) was drawn under the most turbulent period in the country’s recent political history. The past four years have witnessed one historic referendum, two general elections, two major upsets at the ballot box, three prime ministers, the birth of the Brexit Party and multiple anti-Brexit groups, a Supreme Court judgment that the prime minister had behaved unlawfully, and much else along the way ...”

“... West End and then call her. Thus my fascination with London. I went with my mum and then came back by myself when I was 15 to see a musical at the Adelphi called Marilyn. I returned at 18 and ate a bowl of grass in a Vietnamese restaurant in Frith Street. Then I moved down for good in 1990 and spent the next decade in the nearby streets.Soho never was what it ...”

“... not giving any – as well as being admirably genial. After all, says Aldiss, the definition may be wrong, but it doesn’t matter: ‘we can modify it as we go along.’ The definition is as follows: ‘Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge ...”