“... only takes over the reader, but the subject of an essay as well. There is a piece collected in The White Bird about a nude by Frans Hals. No nude by Hals exists, and the essay constructs one. Berger describes details (‘the slewed sheet, its folds like grey twigs woven together to make a nest, and its highlights like falling water’). The same kind of ...”

“... conspicuously unionist stance: the referendum day edition of the Times came with a wraparound red, white and blue cover featuring a quote from ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on the reverse and a brief history of the Union on the inside pages. Almost 45 per cent of Scots voted to leave the UK, but only one newspaper, the Sunday Herald, backed a ‘Yes’ vote. The ...”

“... as the First Reform Bill or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have started by reading in parallel Peter Jenkins’s Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution and the two concluding volumes of Halévy’s magisterial History of the English People in the 19th Century, which between them take the story from 1895 to 1914. The contrast is not so much between an era of greatness ...”

“... struck him as ‘bizarre’, in that the interview took place on the day her husband, Peter Robinson, went to Downing Street to accept the role of First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly ‘and there really was a sense that Iris had stolen his thunder’. Black, who was hired as her political adviser, does not say when he decided to ...”

“... the 1929 Election. In response, the Conservative Government took the unusual step of issuing a White Paper, outlining the Treasury’s objections. When Keynes in turn reviewed this publication, he took particular exception to the way it concluded with the bland contention that the root cause of unemployment lay in the high money costs of ...”

“... My first thoughts, in connection with suits, are of Lucky Lucan, Joseph Beuys and the Thin White Duke, at the head of an imaginary horde of accountants, dandies, clubland heroes, zoot-suiters and funeral directors. It has taken me some time to realise that the question of suits is indeed a crucial question, not only about fashion but about sexual identity, national culture and art history ...”

“... evidence supporting Khodorkovsky had actually given evidence against him. Black was turned to white, white to black. The very absurdity was the point: the Kremlin was saying it had complete control over reality and that whatever it said, however ridiculous, was the truth. Since the Khodorkovsky trial there have been a ...”

“... the first morning had a giddy, almost nervous energy. It was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. The biggest constituency, men in jeans and T-shirts, wouldn’t have looked out of place at one of the rock concerts advertised on the NEC’s hoardings.Inside the main hall, the queue for the bar was already twenty people deep at 10.30 a.m. Senior ...”

“... Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal ...”

“... to a flattened existence.The reader first glimpses Ivan through the eyes of his older brother, Peter. ‘Didn’t seem fair on the young lad,’ the novel begins, eavesdropping on Peter’s internal monologue, ‘That suit at the funeral.’ Peter, a human rights barrister, is ten ...”

“... knowledge of, and evident affection for, Sayers’s fiction – the detective stories about Lord Peter Wimsey especially. And now, she comes forward with what will surely rank as the definitive biography of Sayers. It is not a book which contains any surprises for those of us who have read the previous biographies. Indeed, Dr Reynolds gives us rather ...”

“... citizen, described by Robert Fagles as ‘arguably the finest Classicist of our day’, by Peter Green as one his nation ‘ought to bronze’, and by Jasper Griffin as a man ‘one would like to have as a friend’. In his long career he has written on many subjects: scholarly articles on the heroes of Attic drama in its golden age, unsentimental ...”

“... of the electorate in 1964 to 34 per cent in 1983. The big growth was in the routine non-manual or white-collar labour force (from 18 to 24 per cent), and in the salariat of managers and executives, professionals and semi-professionals (from 18 to 27 per cent). Since 1964, they conclude, ‘Britain has been transformed from a blue-collar society into a ...”

“... one of his pictures. He answered, “Sometimes translate it into black, and at another time into white. If a bit of black give the emphasis, so does red in my picture, and in the case of translating it into white,” he said, after a brief reflection, “put a grinning line into it that will make it attractive.” ’ The ...”

“... Early on in this book there is a photograph of the British architect Peter Cook’s living-room ‘circa 1970’. Cook is now Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but influential schemes for futuristic ‘walking’ buildings and ‘plug-in’ cities ...”