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“... for their arcane habits of mind and their usually enraptured view of the mediocre and obscure. Paul Henry Lang – doyen of American musicology and the author of the magisterial Music in Western Civilisation – was never slow to point this out: ‘A scholar who, like a Hindu ascetic immersed in self-contemplation, confines himself to his narrow field of ...”

“... successful museum, I walked back across the slightly swaying Millennium Bridge towards St Paul’s and, looking back towards Bankside, I began to think about the life and work of Hagop Sandaldjian.Sandaldjian was born in Alexandria in 1931. His family, who came from Armenia, resettled in Yerevan in 1948, and he embarked on a career as a violinist ...”

“... the national media lose interest the local papers will start. Already the Journal is ringing round North-East MPs asking us to volunteer our expense claims, so they can trawl through them at leisure, picking us off one by one. 13 May. Payback time. A bidding war has broken out between the main parties to see who can display more repentance. Cameron (who has ...”

“... local villains, flashers at worst. And everywhere Burra went, with the possible exception of the North Pennines and extreme Mexico, reminded him of places in Sussex, his home county. From Brewster, Cape Cod, he wrote to Billy Chappell: ‘Its Hastings realy, the figures dearie! I don’t know how they dare parade themselves about with the most terrible gams ...”

“... Memmi, however, these were symptoms of a broader, structural malaise. He depicted colonialism in North Africa – and elsewhere – as ‘a pyramid of privilege’ in which European settlers stood at the top, and the Arab Muslim majority at the absolute bottom. Even the poorest of Europeans – the so-called petits blancs or little whites – had an ...”

“... never enjoyed a good press (although Joyce, oddly, claimed to like it). As hardened a traveller as Paul Theroux emerged wild-eyed and spluttering: ‘I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city ... demented and sick ... a hated city ... one of the nastiest cities in the world ... the old horror ... a city of drunks, of lurkers, of late-risers ... the ...”

“... How much can we really know? We learn that Alix Bowen, kindly teacher of literature, has moved North, where she is pursuing an uncomfortable obsession with Paul Whitmore, a mass murderer who recently dispatched one of her pupils. What pushes people to murder? Where does evil come from? Whitmore has been asking questions ...”

“... Davis specialises in. ‘He’ll be back,’ she insists. He won’t, or not in that way. He goes north and marries someone else. When he does return, Julie is delighted, and practises her apologies. She is the last person to learn the truth of the situation, and actually does apologise, very gracefully, in a white dress, before she finds out what’s really ...”

“... to settle in San Francisco in 1949 after hearing that you could get a five-course Italian meal in North Beach for 75 cents (this turned out not to be true). Albert got a job with an architecture firm, and they had six children in nine years – Xavier, Aiko, Hudson, Adam, Addie and Paul. Asawa found a way to work alongside ...”

“... have one. One of the film’s most elegant tactics, taken from the play it is based on, Farragut North, by Beau Willimon, is to displace the action from the notional dramatic limelight rather than shove it ever more into it. This is a tale not of an American presidential election, or even an election campaign, but of a campaign to become a candidate in such ...”

“... spot where Hammershøi painted from his rooms above 67 Great Russell Street. Today it’s Celia Paul who has a studio opposite the museum: ‘When I lie in bed, I am eye-level with the frieze above the door.’ She paints its façade shrouded in blackest brown and electric yellow, a dark imposing monolith from the days of gaslight, dripping with sulphurous ...”

“... but he sought out obscure passages and he enriched contexts. These are some of his subjects: St Paul, a prisoner on his way to Rome, is shipwrecked near Malta. He and other prisoners reach the shore, where the inhabitants welcome them and light a fire to dry their clothes. A snake bites him as he collects wood. He throws it on the fire. He survives the bite ...”

“... Aires in a pub brawl. Infertility is world-wide, but we are not concerned with its effects in North or South America, Africa or India, or anywhere but Britain, where the apparently benevolent authority of the Council is ruled or guided by the Warden, Xan Lypiatt. Interest in sex is waning, although substitutes in the form of various massages are available ...”

“... the delegation, was a geologist famous for pointing out that England was slowly tilting into the North Sea. The novelist and translator Rex Warner had been a left-winger in his youth but was now a comfortably-off, convivial figure. Sir Hugh Casson, who had directed the architecture of the Festival of Britain, was lively-minded, self-critical and immune to ...”

“... been harassed by the African children chanting Oyinbo! – which means, roughly, ‘Paleface!’ Paul Levy’s experience, recorded in Finger Lickin’ Good, is not wholly dissimilar. He is food correspondent for the Observer and has written scholarly books about Bloomsbury people: we might suppose him to be British-born, but he was raised in Kentucky, the ...”