“... They exchanged vows on the brink of a cliff: ‘Prophetically,’ says the author. He is not a man to let a symbol give him the slip. The unblushing bride was born in 1958. Her mother, also called Madonna, was a French-Canadian X-ray technician; her father, the son of Italian immigrants, was an engineer. The family was ...”

“... lesser Thackeray’ – Trollope. He refines an argument originally put forward by Gordon Ray: that Thackeray’s great project in fiction was to ‘redefine’ the gentlemanly ideal for a middle-class Victorian ethos. Historically, Gilmour sees the Victorian preoccupation with gentlemanliness (and its derivative, ‘manliness’) as signalling the ...”

“... were obviously the Mojave, peopled by tribes lifted straight from Doughty, but re-equipped with ray-guns. And the ultimate classic of desert SF, Frank Herbert’s Dune, even echoes Doughty in its format, with an apparatus of appendices and a map. But is that tribute paid to the book or the legend? Even among the canon of Great Unread Masterpieces, Travels ...”

“... past ... remains a massive justification’ – is reluctantly given. The author is a fastidious man, morally and aesthetically, and a natural dove. But in addition to his scruples – alluded to but never defined – about Israel’s policy and moral tone, there is a further disappointment. Zionists believed that, by becoming a nation like any other, the ...”

“... with saliva, sweat and a deluge of fucks, cunts and bastards (flat ‘a’ – bas-tards!). A big man who can move like lightning; a pathologically aggrieved pub lout who’s read some books; a ‘cheeky monkey’ from the Kop. Sayle’s posture is manically contemptuous, his rhythm a hysterical crescendo of obscenity with spat-out satirical asides. Both the ...”

“... with the disdain she feared at all the shops she usually went to – Daniel Neal did not X-ray any old child’s feet. The only place that accepted them was a gloomy little cobbler’s shop which, as I remember it, was hidden away under a near derelict railway arch in the fashion wasteland of King’s Cross. The Dickensian and mawkish nature of the ...”

“... Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots? My natural bent is to think that he is chatting the man up: I do not find him saying such things in his official correspondence with Paris; nor do I find that on such grounds kings and councillors made their decisions about the destinies of state and church. Not Queen Elizabeth, who would surely have giggled if ...”

“... afford endless hours of pleasure to fanatics. The same goes for great specialist bowlers such as Ray Lindwall or Lance Gibbs. Any one of those, and many, many others like them, can break the balance. They do so by steady control, correctness, discipline, line, length, rhythm. They are specialists up against other specialists, and even a BBC commentator can ...”

“... feels that the 17th-century Dutch walls in Vermeer’s paintings are ‘as old as Egypt’. As a man Vermeer is little more to us than a signature. There is virtually no evidence for his artistic training, his character, or even his appearance, and his modest oeuvre – 35 canvases, not counting a couple of debatably attributed pieces – was unknown to the ...”

“... Rutherford was one of my early heroes, and Wilson’s biography of this great and lovable man has enlivened and enlarged, rather than debunked, my youthful image. Rutherford was the man who created the atomic age: a farmer’s boy from New Zealand whose brilliance and Herculean energy brought him the Presidency of the Royal Society, a peerage, and honours from all over the world ...”

“... goes: but it is left to the reader to try to fit the pieces together into an intelligible whole. Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein succeeded in bringing an enigmatic character to life, but Moorehead’s book leaves the real Russell just out of reach – a mere compilation of deeds and words. She seems not to be able to enter into Russell’s anguished ...”

“... over? I grew up in the 1950s, in North Hollywood, where a common sight from a passing car was a man in his thirties, alone in his front yard, mowing the lawn with a push mower – a hard shove, a stop, and another shove with that metallic rush of blades. In American films of the 1940s and 1950s, Robert Ryan (1909-73) seemed one of the angry men of the war ...”

“... records. It wasn’t as much fun, except for the stunning and disturbing first visit to Britain of Ray Charles, whom I had first heard as one of a handful of whites in a corner of a vast rock-and-roll dance in Oakland, California, when he was still known only to the black public. They did not dance much while he sang. By now not quite a major pop star but ...”

“... women of nobility with black attendants, and the upturned face and twisting figure of the young man seem angled to some person we cannot see. The girl is probably Robert’s daughter Margaret. Illuminated from the right while all else is lit from the left, she is almost certainly copied from another portrait. The painter, a Dutchman in East Anglia ...”

“... he had sat through the saga of Jennifer’s Ear, a deal of ruin in electioneering. The Grand Old Man was actually no slouch at the game of media manipulation. It was he, above all, who succeeded in using the new technology of his day to project his policy and his personality in the country. While other leaders rested on the reputation they had made in ...”