“... fit for purpose. No doubt the visitors partly wanted the Italians to appear like that – it was more romantic. They were fascinated by the dilapidated interior lives of the old palazzi, and half-longed to follow their inhabitants inside – but you can usually detect condescension and exasperation entangled with their interest. Could the Italians really be ...”

“... of a sheet of paper between the right and the wrong of this affair.’ Marlow murmurs: ‘How much more did you want?’ Jim can’t forget his guilt and can’t face it either, and Marlow arrives at a philosophical conclusion: ‘The truth seems to be that it is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact.’ Marlow can’t have known that he was sketching a theory ...”

“... conscious enough to beg his friend to shoot him again. Fallada, who was short-sighted, fired three more bullets: one for Necker, two for himself. The first entered his lung, the other narrowly missed his heart. Stumbling back down the path to Rudolstadt, he was found by a forester who took him to hospital. His mother’s first reaction to her son attempting ...”

“... As with many of those who are dependent for their status on the high status of others – none more than Spender, who thought ‘continually of those who were truly great’ – there appeared to be a measure of disdain in the well-stirred cocktail of familiarity. He had met the little novelist in the spring of 1928, and Isherwood later recalled ...”

“... one in three of the 230 works arouse a desire to have them in a permanent collection here, but no more than three of the rooms in the show give a feeling of satisfaction. The first is Gallery Nine at Burlington House, a square room where superb Frank Steallas of his black period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in ...”

“... forger called Gabriel Varney, who was reworked from elements in the life of the forger-poisoner Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Bulwer-Lytton was the most distinguished of the sensationally popular Newgate novelists. His closest rival, Harrison Ainsworth, managed nothing more than romantic escapism with a thick accretion of ...”

“... have to live with and use. The day will come When we’ll have to. But for now They’re useless, more trees in a landscape of trees. I take ‘useless’ to be a term of pleasure. Responsibilities may begin in dreams, as Yeats and Delmore Schwartz mused: but such a beginning can be eluded, Ashbery takes pleasure in assuming. There is time yet. ‘Not until ...”

“... said: ‘Well, then, there is nothing to worry about. I have rarely come across a family with more than sixteen.’ Jolly places, confessionals. Not until she was in her fifties did Elizabeth Longford turn to writing. Her journalism included columns for Beaverbrook and ‘clean’ articles for the News of the World. Contemplating a biography of her ...”

“... took place in America, and since then there have been two parallel social developments that more and more put each other out.’ Like many of Wilson’s distended aperçus, this one has a Quasimodo-like hunch, and yet like Quasimodo it still rings a bell. Even so, few Brits could have imagined, as they outstayed an ...”

“... increase in London’s size and wealth. The city’s population tripled between 1600 and 1720 to more than 600,000 people. Its docks grew busier, its fleets larger, its merchants ever richer. Between the 1660s and the 1680s, imports of sugar from West Indian slave plantations into London tripled in value; every year, two thousand ships queued up to offload ...”

“... about his predecessor ‘the first George W.’, but it’s hard to imagine two politicians with more different styles. George Bush invites world leaders to barbeques at his Texas ranch, and gives nicknames to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.) George Washington, on the other hand, was ...”

“... at each other in a brotherly way, and their teeth were equally white.’ A live animal is so much more fascinating than the splendid doll, for reasons that underlie the erotics Marquard Smith explores in his peculiar and highly equivocal study. Yet a doll promises everything the rat in a cage can give and more: she/he/it ...”

“... of superiority. He compared Eliot the critic to a father punishing a naughty child: ‘It hurts me more than it does you, Charlie.’ In Eliot’s prose, he said, ‘one smells the sadist.’ At the age of 26 Thayer went to Chicago to see if he could earn his own living for a month. ‘I want to show you,’ he wrote to Elaine, then his fiancée, who was also ...”

“... Golding in 1956, in a collection called Sometime, Never. Taken together the three stories read more like fables than fantasy or science fiction, and they glance curiously at the contemporary world they are not directly seeking to imitate. But whereas Wyndham explores genetics and medical experiments in an undated time and Golding takes on inventions in ...”

“... So what were the differences between the civilisations that disappeared and those that adapted more or less successfully to changing circumstances over the millennia? To say that the societies that have survived have done so because they managed their habitats well, maintained profitable relationships with their neighbours and prevented their members from ...”