“... Snip and you have, for example, the violent spirit of the time: Bath Theatre Royal bar manager Mr Peter Coe is being treated for back injuries after being attacked by two Brownies. The girls, aged about nine, lost their tempers because he had run out of ice cream. They kicked and kneed him and he was hurt when he fell over ... Other members of Mr Coe’s ...”

“... later from a New York law practice. Then he took to writing his memoirs. On Christmas morning I read 78 pages he sent to the Atlantic Monthly. The rejection note has been lost. Christian’s grandfather Rauch fled the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin for Denmark, a refugee of the Napoleonic Wars. He had a farm in Jutland and died in 1809. Of his two ...”

“... Paris figures in the titles of both James Campbell’s and Peter Lennon’s books, but this is a restricted, specialised Paris. Campbell takes us into something called the ‘Interzone’ (the term is odd, and troublesome), inhabited by assorted exiles, misfits and drop-outs during the Fifties and late Forties. Lennon’s jaunty impressionistic book takes us into the Sixties, with an account of his experiences as a young journalist writing, sporadically, for the Guardian, while, in the intervals, getting caught up in all kinds of adventures (best of all an improbable encounter, in the company of Samuel Beckett, with Peter O’Toole ...”

“... a dodgy stockbroker? Yes, it was the man in the runcible hat, Edward Lear. His latest biographer, Peter Levi, confides to us that, like Lear’s mother, his own grandmother also had 21 children. Easily lured into digression, Levi adds that ‘it is not uncommon in such families that by some mysterious compensation of nature a number of the children or ...”

“... This theory later became the central slogan of the Thatcher-Reagan reaction of the Eighties. Peter Taylor’s marvellous book does awful damage to it. He deals with the power of the tobacco companies, especially the six giant ones which control the production, distribution and marketing of the crop all over the world. Tobacco has been around for some ...”

“... would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter Porter. He was an Australian immigrant in London, and had written a lot of poems, but published relatively few; she was a nurse who seemed ‘very English’ in accent and tastes, and was admired for having a figure like a ballet dancer. They set up home ...”

“... sending important letters to large organisations. Anne Frank is the only Jewish saint. I first read the diary of Anne Frank when I was about the same age as she was when she began to write it. She seemed to me perfectly to fit the bill as a possible intercessor. Perhaps, in the years after the war, young Jewish girls all over Europe discovered her as a ...”

“... external world becomes a way of internalising her own rejection. Forrest-Thomson’s later poems read like witty performance monologues – made for the stage, but more attracted to the confessional’s self-inculpating theatre than she was able to admit in Poetic Artifice: They that have power to hurt and do so Should not be blamed by Shakespeare or anyone ...”

“... vest of the executioner. This drapery, which is so loose and bunched up that it is difficult to read the bodies behind it, makes a loop which crosses the linear pattern of arms and shadows and surrounds the central figure of Agatha. Her face, bare shoulders and right arm are the eye’s starting point and final resting place. The effect is operatic. An ...”

“... handsome set of late Victorian printed books in a plum-coloured binding. I take down a volume, and read on the spine the name ‘David Copperfield’; underneath, in slightly smaller letters, is another name, ‘Charles Dickens’. I open the book, and find the same combination repeated on the title page. I have heard of Dickens, and conclude that what I am ...”

“... I thought of Daisy, and a large body of periodical writing. But it was probably not because he had read much of this writing that Nabokov approached Wilson almost as soon as he arrived in America. He had reason to believe that Wilson could find him work. Wilson had never read Nabokov either, but did as he was asked ...”

“... from distortions of vision, some not. Viewed in this light, the history of modern painting can be read as a set of transformations of ‘normal’ images which bear a close resemblance to the effects of faulty sight. The blurs, distortions, mistings-over, narrowings and fragmentations of vision which follow from mechanical failures like distortion of the ...”

“... of some truth that has been confabulated?) Only when they are dead are the letters allowed to be read. That is the meaning, the weight of having the last word. Something happened, or someone did something – and those of us who are innocent will have to remain in ignorance, never knowing who did what. The accusation doesn’t go away. Nor can the magnitude ...”

“... to take over the Russian near-abroad, or Swedes who want to avenge their defeat at the hands of Peter the Great (that pearl came from Kiselev). It’s hard to find anyone who takes this stuff literally, but it helps to create a climate in which conspiracy becomes the norm. The Ukrainian crisis has also triggered other, far less savoury associations. At one ...”