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“... past has mouldered quite away, Except the sparse and spartan treasures shut     Into a few glass cases, a confined array     From which the visitor can deduce play, Blood, work, a Viking handful, no extravaganza. I’ll squeeze a catalogue into a single stanza: First off, a knight defeating dragons on a door     That once led to a church; then ...”

“... until you see, far off, the secondary Downtown of the Galleria area, and the glinting monolith of Philip Johnson’s Transco Tower. Johnson is perhaps the most conspicuous architect in the Houston cityscape. He was brought in by the Menils, the city’s great artistic benefactors, and his later career is interestingly represented here. First there is the ...”

“... to see what you saw before – a smooth, uniform surface, as anonymous as a projection on ground glass. Velázquez’s surface is strikingly various – a lively calligraphy in which each stroke is adapted to its purpose. There are marks for flames, for cheeks, for gleams on armour and sparkles on braid. As you retreat, each mark takes on the look of the ...”

“... The Darwin exhibition gives authenticity major play: on display are the actual magnifying glass that Darwin used, the actual notebooks in which he recorded his observations, the very notebook in which he wrote the famous sentences that first described his theory of evolution. But in the children’s reactions to the inert but alive Galapagos ...”

“... Did this put him beyond all possibility of acceptance or belonging? An alien? In The Human Stain, Philip Roth showed us Coleman Silk, a black man whose whole life had been a shoring-up of a place of greater safety for himself as a member of the white intelligentsia, a person who sought to put his secret self permanently out of sight in order to live as he ...”

“... drawing or tracing or colouring, or doing the same at the dining room table under the stained-glass lampshade, reproducing the comics and cartoon characters that he so loved, already certain that his efforts would meet with the unstinting approbation of his parents and grandparents. Then there was the example of his father, ‘running scared financially ...”

“... bloggers clamoured to interview and in some cases canonise her. Heti has been called the heir to Philip Roth, or to Joan Didion, and the literary equivalent of the filmmaker Lena Dunham or the songwriter Frank Ocean, who astonished the luridly heterosexual R’n’B scene last year by recording love songs addressed to his boyfriend. But what if she’d just ...”

“... 1905; his court dress, alongside that of his wife, can be seen mouldering away satisfactorily in a glass case in Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial, a graceful monument to Disraeli’s diplomatically dubious but politically effective forays into imperial window-dressing. Curzon had seen himself as something in the way of a philosopher-viceroy, a Platonic guardian ...”

“... in the late 20th century. And some of his most characteristic tropes found distinguished copyists: Philip Johnson, for example, created an extraordinarily Soanean New York synagogue in the 1950s, and referred disarmingly to ‘the most cuddly, marvellous feeling’ of imitating Soane. Even more strikingly, Soane has been conscripted into the genealogy of ...”

“... possessive woman I have ever known’. She did not get what she wanted. Macmillan’s solicitor Philip Frere pointed out that divorce would be fatal for his political career and recommended a ‘west wing-east wing’ solution, traditional among the estranged upper classes who had houses large enough for the purpose. Until she died in 1966 – suddenly, of ...”

“... for the distorting power of what is, by any measure, the richest single source, the letters to Philip Larkin. Some 530 of these survive, almost half of which were printed in Leader’s edition, predominantly from the 1940s and 1950s, the period of their greatest intimacy. They wrote to amuse each other but also to outdo each other, especially in ...”

“... and straggling villages: from half a mile off it was as remote as a little world inside a blown glass paperweight.’ The realities of life on land, and of the characters whom George has left there, seem pale and undeveloped by comparison with the vividness of life at sea. I am not sure that this is what Raban originally planned. He opens his book with a ...”

“... more like Edward Lear than King Lear. All successful artists view the world through a distorting glass which one can loosely define as style. It is a commonplace that artists make up their own worlds, and Waugh’s hilarious vision of things was so pervasive and distinctive that it could not be contained within the pages of his books. ‘I see nothing ...”

“... to watch over her. It is a familiar scheme in the movies, akin to General Sternwood enlisting Philip Marlowe to take care of his wild daughter in The Big Sleep. And we learned to trust the immaculate Marlowe and to love Bogart playing him, because no matter the fix he’s in, the private eye has a wisecrack and flawless assurance, as well as Lauren Bacall ...”

“... Crombie, pockets filled with crumpled paper and crumbs of chocolate, is the Thanet translation of Philip Marlowe’s trenchcoat. A trip through this territory, guided by the man himself, is both exhilarating and exhausting. He doesn’t talk, he lectures. Loudly. With a full head of steam. Like a man starved of proper conversation, denied an ...”