“... hyperbole for someone who, though he was a conscript, never fired a pistol. (Sartre served as a wall-eyed meteorologist in the French army.)The most muddled and disputed handgun episode in modern literary history is the Russian roulette story that Graham Greene told, and retold, to friends and explained in his memoir A Sort of Life. The gun belonged to his ...”

“... spirit left to be broken. All this we should have known long ago. Think of the career of the great Richard Topcliffe, chief ‘poursuivant’ or persecutor of Jesuit missionaries in the reign of Elizabeth I. Topcliffe is perhaps not much spoken of except by historians of the Catholic martyrs or close students of Donne, who mentioned him in passing but deleted ...”

“... the pile proved to be ruinously expensive and the family moved from castle to country house. The Wall Street crash of 1929 obliged the young Deedes to quit Harrow and its unattractive headmaster Cyril Norwood. Deedes tells how Norwood, who had a slight Cockney accent, once complained to the assembled school: ‘This has been the worst term I have ever ...”

“... arms folded over his chest, legs spread, one knee bent. A crucifix is fastened low on the wall above the bed, lending the work a little obscenity. These sensual images would not be exhibited until 1970. From 1934 to 1943, Neel was employed by the Federal Art Project – part of Roosevelt’s New Deal programme. She was assigned to the ‘easel ...”

“... herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and twenty. The French have lost ten thousand, of whom all but sixteen hundred were persons of ‘blood and quality’. There is debate over the degree to which Shakespeare ...”

“... he believed he was being watched, possibly through a small hole drilled through his bedroom wall from his neighbour’s flat. (He called the police about it and they told him to fill the hole with caulk.) He was questioned by Canadian intelligence, but let go. Still, he was spooked, and in January 2000 he set off to return to Mauritania, via Dakar; on ...”

“... are stones that fly,’ he says in the first poem of ‘Day’, ‘to settle in a wall.’ Words, poems, are used for establishing or recovering contact, rather than defining a distance. Where visual definition is involved, there is a painterly, not a photographer’s perspective, a stress on remaking rather than on ...”

“... of any kind, it is not surprising that he blames the national state, not capitalism or Wall Street, for the Great Depression. The economy was ‘fundamentally sound’ and would have quickly righted itself after the Stock Market crash of 1929 had not Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt indulged their penchant for ‘social engineering’. Most ...”

“... critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly ...”

“... a dead bee goes round and round in the coffee the boy has stirred; a white slug is frozen on a wall; a black carafe of wine stands on the table ‘like an axis’ around which the grown-ups are laughing and talking. Repetition and variation have their narrative counterpart, too – and The Question of Bruno isn’t so much a collection of short stories as ...”

“... The description of what we might call Pan prior, ‘the first chimpanzee’, is from an essay by Richard Wrangham in Tree of Origin. Like The Ape and the Sushi Master, Tree of Origin proposes that we (human beings) share with our near primate cousins some of the behaviour we like best in ourselves. Professional primate-watchers are usually wary of venturing ...”

“... doors could be fitted into walls, or the width of the gap between a floorboard and the plaster wall that floated above it. Koolhaas seemed to be trashing the very possibility of architecture, on his way towards the exit. Neither he nor Krier seemed much interested in the physical, material possibilities of architecture. The difference was that while Krier ...”

“... so as to excise the offending jokes, adjectives and colour-phrases. The first breach of this wall of boredom was effected when the Peter Simple column was invented. It was evidently created to accommodate an incorrigibly funny writer who had a regrettable habit of putting jokes in his leading articles – a certain Colin Welch. According to ...”

“... is the letter rack, a simple arrangement of three horizontal leather straps, attached to a wall, holding in place a bustling miscellany of textual props: in one typical example there is an almanac; a folded newspaper; a dog-eared royal speech; a quill; a knife; a comb; pieces of (‘slightly phallic’) red and black sticks of wax, singed, it ...”

“... new arrival presented an opportunity to learn about the Greeks and their language. Eventually, as Richard Calis writes, Crusius ‘compiled the period’s richest record of Greek life under Ottoman rule’. In The Discovery of Ottoman Greece, Calis reconstructs Crusius’s efforts to learn about modern Greece from his corner of the Holy Roman Empire. What ...”