“... in particular on the look’s trajectory, its slight downward tilt, and the fact of its being in shadow, thanks to the un-discarded helmet. Naturally Veronese has given the look an explanation within the surface logic of the scene: Mars is looking past Venus at the child’s play on the floor. But one sees why Velázquez extracted the look and made it his ...”

“... sinking, with stories that look to past and future. What if the binoculars had not been left in a cabinet in Southampton; what if First Officer Murdoch had rammed the iceberg head on, not grazed it; what if the Californian had heard the distress signal; what if it had recognised the flares as signs of distress; what if it had recognised the Titanic as the ...”

“... There was a stand-off. Later it was revealed that Franco had convened a special meeting of his cabinet to discuss how to respond. Demonstrations in the city to support those locked inside the monastery were attacked by the police. Inside the monastery, the phones were cut off and the supply of water and food interrupted. Finally, the building, although ...”

“... Artelia, asking for ‘good costs’, best prices, to show the following day to the council’s cabinet member for housing, Rock Feilding-Mellen, and the council planner. It was alleged by the Times that this email provoked the decision to go for ‘using aluminium panels rather than zinc’, which ‘could mean a “saving of £293,368”’. But the ...”

“... distance, while the prime minister, Edouard Philippe, and various members of his cabinet were shoved forward to condemn the violence and announce that there would be no change of position on fuel tax. But the gilets jaunes now had bigger, more nebulous ambitions than the price of fuel. The time had come for Macron to take to the airwaves. A ...”

“... spare arm. He may well have been an early-rising, walk-to-work rambler, appreciative of the ruled shadow-lines of the trees, the suddenly voluptuous blossom season; a man like myself, determined to respect his regular route in denial of the padlocked park gates. Rough sleepers, in these pinched days, have disappeared. Regiments of Polish builders have ...”

“... are radically under-informed about the actual incomes of high earners. Some seem to think that cabinet ministers and FTSE 100 CEOs are both part of an ‘elite’ who receive similar remuneration; in reality, where the former earn roughly five times the average wage, the latter earn something like 120 times that amount. But then silly-money salaries seem ...”

“... Houses, Baudelaire, Panoramas and Dioramas, the Idea of Progress: there was from the beginning a shadow spreading across the notecards, of a larger, more wonderful study in which all the great dreams of his father’s generation, and his father’s father’s, would be related and denounced. ‘We have to wake up from the existence of our parents,’ he ...”

“... a clerk very conscientious and quiet and dull, who wore snuff-coloured garb and filed herself in a cabinet every night and whose narrow heart fluttered when anyone mentioned a flying freehold or an ancient right of way. But you’re not looking at me, I thought. I was quite thin; nausea was wearing me away. I left Dr G’s consulting room and stood on the ...”

“... Britain and Denmark all posting higher rates of growth over the same period. Casting a further shadow over the legacy of Maastricht, the Stability Pact which was supposed to ensure that fiscal indiscipline at national level would not undermine monetary rigour at supranational level has been breached repeatedly and with impunity by both Germany and ...”

“... would be killed by the natives. (He would end up as minister of war in Georges Clemenceau’s 1906 cabinet.) Picquart’s testimony at Zola’s trial – for which he had temporarily been let out of detention – was one of the high points of the proceedings. Despite being virulently hated, or perhaps for that reason, he was a bit of a superstar and for hours ...”

“... to prevent anything comparable to German de-Nazification. But they were in a minority in the cabinet, where the secular left held more posts. At this juncture the PCI, instead of putting the DC on the defensive by pressing for an uncompromising purge of the state – cleaning out all senior collaborationist officials in the bureaucracy, judiciary, army ...”

“... and he may have hidden there. His lucky escape haunted him for the rest of his life – the shadow of the gallows, images of executions and, as in the case of Moll Flanders, sometimes of reprieves, fall across all his writings. Like his maker, Crusoe is a deeply anxious as well as courageous personality, describing at one point how he feels in ‘great ...”

“... that they don’t have. It hangs about the house though; the teapot, unused, sits in the china cabinet, looking silly, but my mother keeps hair grips in the doll’s cottage that is meant to be a sugar basin. Years pass. A dozen sets of crockery are smashed, but the cottage survives. Its tiny windowpanes accrete a rim of grime. And grimly, night after ...”

“... I remember the words vividly as she said: ‘He is the love of her life.’ Always, there was the shadow of what they had been doing in Germany. In Black List, Section H, the narrator went to Germany not because he admired Hitler or the Nazis, but because he sought his own crucifixion there, sought to be where there was darkness and destruction. If the book ...”