“... even slightly frowned on). The pigeons were kept in wooden Tate and Lyle sugar boxes nailed to the wall. Mr Osman’s grandfather built a loft in the backyard. He had great affection for the creatures, and he would write articles about them, arguing for their nobility and beauty. He wanted to make them respectable. He founded the federation of pigeon clubs; he ...”

“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar to ...”

“... field with its drystane dyke made from the detritus of the last Ice Age. On the other side of this wall was the Quarry Wood, a long-overgrown granite works which gives Nan Shepherd’s first novel its title. My father once told me that the hardcore base of our driveway was made from the Quarry Wood wall. Sure enough, another ...”

“... between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her ...”

“... In 1843, the artist Richard Dadd murdered his father and was put away in Bethlem Hospital, Britain’s oldest lunatic asylum; his portrait of the alienist Sir Alexander Morison stares from the cover of Masters of Bedlam, gauntly silhouetted against a mottled sky. He seems to be looking at something he finds hard to bear ...”

“... He wasn’t poor: in fact, he was very rich, the son of Charles Merrill, founder of the biggest Wall Street brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch. He wasn’t tormented – at least he didn’t have mental breakdowns or attempt suicide. He drank a lot but not famously and he eventually joined AA without becoming sanctimonious or losing his talent; some of his best ...”

“... The slogan was: ‘If you paid full price, you didn’t buy it at Crown.’ Hunter’s went to the wall. Customer loyalty, built up over decades, crumbled in months. Readers always think books overpriced – which they aren’t – and can rarely resist the opportunity to buy two for the price of one. Crown was hugely successful in its heyday. It was the first ...”

“... darkness’ homeland? Yet Harris’s ‘thank you’ is not just a perversity. It finds an echo in Richard Wright’s question: ‘What does an African facing an African American see?’ It also finds an echo in Manthia Diawara’s answer: I see Toni Cade Bambara, I see Kamau Brathwaite, I see James Baldwin, I see Bob Marley, I see James Brown, I see ...”

“... of the earliest letters, written when Gabriel was seven, records his ‘reading Shakespeare’s Richard the 3rd for my amusement . . . I, Maria, and William know several scenes by heart. I have bought a picture of Richard and Richmond fighting, and I gilded it after which I cut it out with no white.’ This self-assured ...”

“... him in Berlin and admitted that he was very much a product of that culture. He cited lyrics from a Richard Tauber song from Lehár’s Land of Smiles that had remained with him all these years – ‘Always smiling and always cheerful’ – and implied that this was part of his own persona too. His new book is much like that. The darker side of Modernism is ...”

“... desires,’ he remarks near the end of his letter, ‘and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches.’ A dependency so exclusively visual anticipates the visionary idealised and dehumanised presence of the female figures evoked in parts of The Waste Land, and more decisively in ‘Ash Wednesday’ and the Quartets. The ...”

“... the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ‘the least sacred place in Jerusalem’. The Western or Wailing Wall, so sacred to Jews, also seems to have moved. Originally it was the western wall of the city, but from the 16th century it has been the western wall of Herod’s platform. Beacause of ...”

“... evening lately I saw the old lady sitting at her window, facing west, or rather, facing the west wall of her room. Her hair is completely white. She was reading what appeared to be a letter, holding it at an angle in front of her as you would a newspaper. It was one of those lucky evenings when the white summer day turns to amber before it begins to break up ...”

“... window by Hans Gottfried von Stockhausen which dominates, and virtually forms, the south wall. It depicts, in quasi-abstract terms, the escape of the Israelites from nameless persecution, and the miraculous parting of the waves that allows them to cross a hostile sea in a procession so formed as to suggest, alternatively, the Ark and Jonah’s ...”

“... turns into Comrade Orwell in the Eighties,’ as he puts it. Orwell went through the lackey of Wall Street phrase to the discovery that Nineteen Eighty-Four was really an attack on the United States and the FBI, and that Orwell himself was a good fellow who ‘shared dry crusts with the clochards of Paris’. The present situation, as described by ...”