“... I am beginning to recover from the effects of being knocked down in Old Compton Street by a motor-car. Now I can walk to the end of the road. The other day I made an excursion as far as Camden Town to have my hair cut. This left me a little tired but otherwise unharmed. I resolved on a more ambitious venture: nothing less than a journey to Oxford when I drove part of the way myself ...”

“... space before the pulpit during the whole time of divine service, and a sermon then and there to be preached against the crime of fornication and incest, and immediately after the sermon shall with an audible voice make this humble acknowledgment, repeating the same after the minister namely ‘I, Thomas Odam, do here before God acknowledge and confess ...”

“... and his latest book, like some of its predecessors, is as odd as it is learned. It begins, but by no means ends, with a minute enquiry into the expression in medias res. Horace observed that Homer, instead of starting his poem about the Trojan War from the beginning – ab ovo, Leda’s egg from which was hatched Helen of Troy – chose to rush his ...”

“... the late Thirties; but maybe it symbolises the lack of Western metaphors for what it’s like to be Albanian. Albania has been behind one iron curtain or another for centuries, and its impenetrability is its lure. It is probably cultural condescension, but I don’t think any literary agent would have been prepared to promote this bumbly amateurish novel ...”

“... like Gerald Nabarro. After the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, when Macmillan was panicked by a typical Rab Butler indiscretion into sacking the dead wood in his Cabinet, Deedes was brought in to oversee the Government’s public relations. Spin-doctors were unheard of at that time, and Deedes’s task was to exploit his Fleet Street contacts to the ...”

“... Execution altered conception. Ray discovered that the intimacy he wished to create was frustrated by his decision to produce the sculpture in stainless steel – which required an industrial-grade machine. The result was ‘a work that I feel I didn’t make, but that somehow made itself’. The notion of a self-making sculpture seems all the more relevant ...”

“... have never panned out, but you can visit the one in Nottingham any Saturday night – a sign by the loos plaintively reads: MIAMI, 4378 MILES —>.) The ethnography of Hooters culture by ‘Richard Baldwin’ – one of the collaborators’ pseudonyms, actually the borrowed name of one of their friends, a 71-year-old ...”

“... Instead, they are victims of chokeholds, bullets and other ‘restraining’ measures inflicted by the police, and not only below the Mason-Dixon line. Police killings of young black men, along with the mass incarceration of poor blacks in US prisons, have become the symbol of a national disgrace that is no more hidden than the concealed weapons that far ...”

“... look like a skyscraper, but it’s more than a hundred metres high. You come out at the top by pulling up over a ridge of bricks and scaffolding onto an expanse of grey slate, big as an empty town square, between two of the great white chimneys.Giles Gilbert Scott believed in thoroughgoing industrial beauty. We found as we explored that the insides of ...”

“... If you want​ to appeal against a guilty verdict given by a crown court jury you first have to seek permission from the Court of Appeal. For permission to be granted, a judge has to be satisfied there is an ‘arguable case’ that the conviction was ‘unsafe ...”

“... main London dealer and worked with both Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Brausen asked the young David Sylvester to write something for the catalogue. His response remains acute: Richier, he declared, asks ‘not only how much damage the human body can endure and still remain human, but also how far the human body can ...”

“... a while we are forced to grapple with questions like these. We are forever asking for our MPs to be human; but when we are confronted by their humanity, their spiky, quirky, sulky particularity, it quickly becomes painful for us. Who are these people? we demand. Who let them in? Where have they been hiding?They’re not ...”

“... him the subject of suspicion during the Terror, when he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary by a fellow artist Jean-Baptiste Wicar, and accused of making paintings that ‘dirty the walls of the Republic’. Forced to defend himself before the Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts, Boilly was exonerated, largely due to his canny submission of a ...”

“... person at Chanel since its founder, and he wanted less fuss, though he did request that his ashes be mingled with those of his beloved cat, Choupette, if she died before him. Maybe he forgot that the cat had even more lives than he did. Fuss, when it comes to fashion designers, has a way of multiplying, so it was inevitable that Lagerfeld’s memorial, when ...”

“... A woman threw her glass of wine at me,’ James Lasdun’s second novel begins. At a party held by a wealthy philanthropist in New York, a woman walks up to the narrator and asks: ‘Excuse me, are you Stefan Vogel?’ He says yes; she flings her wine in his face. In keeping with the novel’s mood of dreamlike self-absorption, the event is replayed many times ...”