“... industry. I take the quotations from Modiano with which I began (and a couple of later ones) from Alan Morris’s sensible book Patrick Modiano, published in 1996, and there have been several full-length works on him in French since, and plenty of articles. With Louis Malle, Modiano wrote the screenplay for Lacombe, Lucien (1974), and he wrote a book in ...”

“... In the darkness a faint spot of light appeared, pale yellow, the reflection of a star untouched by cloud. It blinked out for a few seconds, then reappeared, moving up and down, intermittently hidden behind branches heavy with leaves. Kneeling on the arm of a chair in the darkened study lined with books – smelling of books – he watched the light greedily, his nose pressed against the window, his breath misting the glass ...”

“... was on show, accompanied by Judy Egerton’s fine catalogue, there was also a video, narrated by Alan Bennett. As it finished on the day I was there, the woman in front of me said to her friend: ‘Well, I should hope they weren’t all like that.’ It was a very Bennett moment, as distinct from a Hogarthian one. ‘Missing the point’ was not in ...”

“... Sir William Robertson, is missing. Billy Smart, the circus proprietor, is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ‘Beachcomber’. Enough of that; the game is too easy to play. The entries are skilfully ...”

“... of ice decorated with trailing seaweed; the experience was bathed in white and silver, in seaside light. It was an introduction to the mythology of France, of being British and having to learn what the French have to teach. I did not realise, until I read The English, the French and the Oyster, the extent to which the oyster had been lost to England long ...”

“... journalists Loretta Napoleoni (Insurgent Iraq) and Nick Davies (Flat Earth News) have thrown some light on the dense mesh of official misrepresentation surrounding Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was for some time the official face and emblem of the organisation for US officials. Starting out as a small-time opponent of the Jordanian regime, he was first referred ...”

“... the mice-infested cake and Sir Kevin as Mr Pip tearing down the rotting curtains to let in the light. The Queen, who had the advantage of having once been a breath of fresh air herself, was unconvinced by this scenario, suspecting that this brisk Antipodean wind would in due course blow itself out. Private secretaries, like prime ministers, came and ...”

“... Linda died of emphysema in 1954. Porter, ‘a homosexual who had never seen the closet’, as Alan Jay Lerner put it, was always true to Linda in his fashion. After she had parted ways with her philandering first husband, who was reported to have had sadistic conjugal tastes, Linda ‘had had enough of the sexual side of marriage’, according to Brendan ...”

“... Goldman Sachs’s Robert Rubin to preside over the American economy, and retained and deferred to Alan Greenspan, Clinton has obviously been a good President for the business community. Indeed, he’s been so pro-business that he could not be successfully attacked by Republicans for his economic policies. So why should businessmen, who are nothing if not ...”

“... In this way, ‘Days’, though it has larger and more interesting ends in view, throws some light on the odd gaps between ‘life’ and ‘literature’, and on the always obscure and tangled relations that exist between them before ‘days’ become poems and a life turns into Works. One of the most absorbing subjects available to literary scholarship ...”

“... to the book, where Nozick once again displays his extraordinary skill at combining precision and a light touch. I dare say there have been hundreds of published stabs at the problem, a good many of which have increased our understanding of rational decision. That is the point of paradoxes: harsh confrontation, painful rethinking, new speculation, trial and ...”

“... on the one hand, Joyce and Woolf; on the other, Dorothy Richardson, Modernist, struggling to light a recalcitrant wood stove or wearing galoshes to cook breakfast in a flooded kitchen. In the Twenties and Thirties, Richardson’s work was frequently linked with that of Joyce and Woolf. By the time of Joyce’s death, his reputation was firmly ...”

“... to have a celestial source: she’s at the business of larking with the metaphysical again. Her light, worldly novels don’t exclude a salutary touch of the ineffable. There is always, for this author, some unspoken observer of people’s antics – and this makes things gloriously intriguing and rum. Her ability to shape flawless, droll, astringent ...”

“... turf, grounded in the undergrowth of a forest. These works often use materials that have come to light in the place itself – leaves, rubbed red stones, dry sticks, thorns, the dark fluid from mushroom gills, stones picked from scree, blocks of snow and slivers of ice, earth, deer-dung, scrap iron, fern fronds, spruce thinnings and off-cuts. In this, the ...”

“... wonders what this can mean. ‘Sometimes a woman is just a woman,’ Johnny says. ‘Before you light her up?’ Patrick asks. ‘No, no, that’s a cigar,’ says Johnny. The two men are then joined by Julia: ‘We’ve all been wondering what you’re up to,’ said Julia. ‘Are you baying at the moon, or working out the meaning of ...”