“... is that his troubles were not more immediately fatal; what saved him, I suppose, is that no one took him seriously. The little we know about Urquhart’s early life comes mostly from his own pen, and is therefore not likely to be true. But there is one incident, vouched for in the records, that seems somehow emblematic. In 1636, after his father had ...”

“... a marital scandal in provincial musical circles. She was unamused and offended by his levity: she took his bohemian tolerance of such things as sign of ‘a deplorable looseness in my own character’. He abandoned the subject and, the following day, the diary. Clearly he could not keep it truthfully without some betrayal of his wife. He had not the first ...”

“... the war. Neorealism, a spontaneous development without leaders and with few manifestos, which took shape in the last days of the Second World War, was in some sense a negation of both Fascism and Futurism. It was born in opposition to Fascist propaganda, both aesthetic and political; it embodied a resistance akin to that of Italy’s anti-Fascist ...”

“... with the role he played in the whole sorry saga. He had a ringside view of the decisions Thatcher took, but also a direct connection to their ultimate effects: the small textiles firm run by his wife’s family was one of the many manufacturers, small and large, that didn’t make it out of the 1980s.Lankester got on well with Thatcher, who generally liked ...”

“... Then he can be given a mythical personality: “He spent his time among us, betrayed us, and took the material across the border.” ’ Though the artist may appear to engage with the quotidian and the circumstantial, these involvements are only false fronts masking a supreme detachment; the true writer ‘never participates in anything; his pretences ...”

“... were not alone in esteeming the New Christians: it is even possible that Spanish aristocrats took seriously converso claims that the Jewish élite constituted a true nobility. Though polemicists might inveigh against the smell of the Jew and the converso (attributable partly to bad breath after eating food fried in oil rather than lard or butter), the ...”

“... and superstitious, and at the Buddhist monks who robbed and killed travellers and, moreover, took wives to themselves. The Chinese, he maintained, had ‘no conception of the rules of logic’, and he composed a series of dialogues between a Catholic priest and an indigenous scholar, designed to demonstrate the balance of logic and faith lying at the ...”

“... of many carefully held handshakes. That, as Margaret MacMillan confirms, is more or less what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last ...”

“... I noted with borrowed eloquence; a terrible blandness has taken over.The road out of Belfast took us through neat suburbs fringed with lawns and gardens. The man with the mortgage, we decided, is rarely the man with the mortar. Belfast calls itself the City of the Titanic, as indeed it was, but it has clearly broken out of the dying North Atlantic ...”

“... us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the ...”

“... of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that was a distinctive feature of the ‘American ...”

“... sky it was in Chicago, which felt a congenial thing to do. I changed my money, bought a coffee and took a flight to South Bend without leaving O’Hare.’ In South Bend he was met by John Matthias, poet, anthologist of the splendid and hugely influential 23 Modern British Poets (1971), published in Chicago, and professor at ...”

“... tend, as you might imagine, to include the moment their subject acquired a camera and took a first shot. We’re asked to conjure little Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Jacques Henri Lartigue, on holiday with his parents and a Box Brownie, everyone eager for images. Chris Killip, who was born in 1946 and died in 2020, had never owned a camera or taken a ...”

“... judge read Avedon before he turned to the critics. The few paragraphs in which he describes how he took the pictures for In the American West are the best account of the photographer’s craft I know. They are relevant to work very unlike his own – to Cartier-Bresson’s collection Photoportraits, for example. The arena Avedon works in is execution yard and ...”

“... pockets of shareholders and chief executives. The three top executives at the Apollo Group each took home more than $6 million in 2008; the founder of the University of Phoenix, John Sperling, is a billionaire. By the time students realise that they’ve made a terrible mistake, there is often no way for them to back out ...”