“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... closer to the outlines of Theroux’s history. Neither book is imaginable without the precedent of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound (1981) – in which Zuckerman’s succès de scandale Carnovsky stands in for Portnoy’s Complaint – and The Counterlife (1986). Theroux followed Roth into a hall of mirrors from which it is hard to find the exit. Roth’s ...”

“... Cheney conceded, ‘but the most plentiful source of affordable energy in the country.’ Philip Clapp, president of the US National Environmental Trust, denounced Cheney’s plan as ‘an across-the-board attack on the environment’. Europeans began calling Bush the ‘Toxic Texan’. Scientists have all but unanimously condemned the new US ...”

“... slightly pathetic foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune left-wingers adored him; Michael Foot (as he put it himself) ‘fell an immediate swooning victim to his wit, charm and inordinate capacity for alcohol’, and to his murderous style ...”

“... hours a day to shopping. One dealer remembered him buying ‘rows and rows and rows of mercury glass vases, copper lustre pitchers, Victorian card cases … thousands of rare books, twenty or thirty at a time, dozens of 18th and 19th-century Spanish colonial crucifixes, and santos three or four at a time, and sixty boxes of semi-precious stones, all in one ...”

“... team, led by the late Sir Michael Havers; the juniors were Michael Hill, Paul Purnell and Philip Havers (Sir Michael’s son). The three juniors at a later point signed a note listing, among others, Conlon’s alibi witnesses. They included Burke’s name on the list. However, a separate list later made available to the defence unaccountably omitted ...”

“... for saving Cavaradossi’s life became a query about how much had been paid for the rotgut in the glass. Or Galupe-Borszkh, this time singing Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana, might belatedly realise she’s appearing in a production so cheap that her costume has been made from the same bolt of material as the gingham tablecloth in Lucia’s wine shop. I felt ...”

“... image mirrored in left-right reversal by one of the lenses onto the matte surface of the ground glass. Focusing and composing are more deliberate with a Rollei, affecting the photographer’s relationship to her subject … Since the camera is not hiding the photographer’s face, she can make eye contact directly with the subject before shooting.’ The ...”

“... slight Northern accent. He was one of a large family: Abe; then Bec, the one girl; then my father, Philip, called Phil but Phishel at home, from his Hebrew name, Feisal; then Jack, Harry, Sid, Dave and Louis. Their father was a tailor, one who earned too little, with all those mouths to feed, to be able to buy shoes for his children to wear to school. At 13 or ...”

“... every gathering in the neighbourhood, in another of his evocative images, is full of ‘broken glass’. There is no safety in numbers. Rather it is as if social being, or togetherness, at the very moment it affirms itself by public display, is silently tearing itself apart from the inside. In this light, a woman’s virtue, on which so much is ...”