“... have often thought that your father would have been a happier man if he had taken an occasional glass of whisky, as I do.’ Derry is ebulliently confident of soon tasting the fruits of high office.27 March 1997. Seated next to John Prescott at lunch at the Chamber of Shipping. Am careful not to mention the last occasion, which I’m sure he has ...”

“... chemical work and to his close reading of beloved texts. He read, he says, ‘with a magnifying glass’; it was ‘a pitiless exercise’. This is a man who could find in the ‘fine structure’ of Manzoni’s The Betrothed – the great 19th-century novel to which he returned again and again as his appetite for new books diminished – a tiny physical ...”

“... My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties” ...”

“... street where it once stood, and the disused Victorian warehouse (‘Geo. Farmiloe & Sons, Lead & Glass Merchants’) that more or less marks the spot. But what does survive is the written record, and within it the throng of petty offenders who passed through here, accused rightly or wrongly of picking pockets, filching cloaks, making affrays, calling ...”

“... system formally and informally structured in their favour. Cicero, however, broke through one glass ceiling after another, even managing to get elected consul, the top job – the first time an outsider had managed such a feat in thirty years. He got there not through populism or breathtaking military victories, but by means of his extraordinary talent ...”

“... among university lecturers; some of them, like his colleague in the University of Wittenberg Philip Melanchthon (‘Black-Earth’, from his original surname, Schwarzerdt), kept this name for the rest of their lives. In Dr Luther’s case, though, the new surname was also a devout play on words, reflecting a sense of the liberation which came from his ...”

“... each side are poetry books and typescripts loosely piled, sharpened pencils, and two glass ashtrays, well filled, a bottle of Scotch, a gentle Tomintoul with an inch remaining, a crystal tumbler, a dead fly on its back inside, several aspirins lying on an unused tissue.’ The narrator’s real-time reconstruction of events is immediately ...”

“... the modernist Cologne/Bonn airport and, in Schütte’s description, the ‘purist steel-and-glass skyscraper’ of the Mannesmann engineering company HQ. Presumably there were a lot of commissions to juggle, as nearby Cologne, like so many other postwar European cities, was ‘one vast field of ruins’.Hütter and Schneider would later talk as if the ...”

“... Vermeer paintings (a woman reading a love letter, or writing one, or just admiring herself in the glass), the inner peace of the pictures and the unassertiveness of the sitters, nearly all of them women, are so simple and direct that even two of Rembrandt’s most famous self-portraits, one at either end of his life, seem almost coarse by comparison. I’m ...”

“... they tell of how much sleep has been missed, but because they bring the next day nearer. As Philip Larkin, poet of limits, knew so well, sleep has the one big disadvantage that we wake up from it: ‘In time the curtain edges will grow light,’ he wrote in ‘Aubade’, bringing ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. For Tristan and ...”

“... This unanimity should therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition with that of Kingsley Amis, close friend of the poet’s for over forty years; and to begin with Amis’s recent Booker Prize-winning novel. The ...”

“... do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John ...”

“... They were supplied forthwith: Titian’s ‘Rape of Europa’; Rembrandt’s 1636 self-portrait; a Philip IV by Velazquez; Rubens’s Earl of Arundel – all for what seemed at the time phenomenal, that is to Say, ‘American’ prices. The proceeds from this stupendous bonanza enabled Berenson and his wife to instal themselves in I Tatti, already dreaming ...”

“... threats and intellectual gestures, seems far away, but almost as distant is the world of Philip Larkin, with all its equally carefully set-up shabbinesses, contrivances and confidences which only ten years ago seemed an exact and honest image of the way people actually lived. To the poetry of every age its dream and image of itself, but there seems ...”

“... as the COP president, who after Boris Johnson had her sacked got a job representing BP, Shell and Philip Morris, among others, with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Sharma had been subsisting on Jelly Babies and Lucozade tablets. He hadn’t slept for days.When he became tearful at the final plenary, he was applauded, in a strange ...”