“... Vries arranges the natural world in sensory forms. The centrepiece is a two-metre-wide circle of rose petals on the floor; you can smell them from the avenue beyond. On the walls are tableaux of 84 samples of earth from different parts of the world – an abstract pattern of yellows, pale greys, orange-reds, burnt and dusky browns – and From the Laguna, a ...”

“... have struggled to turn a profit; many have ended up at one point or another in unscrupulous hands. Peter Cook’s venture, the Establishment, was taken over by gangsters in 1963; in 1972 John Aspinall sold the Clermont to Playboy as its main London casino. In 1976, George Marks, a jovial Canadian-American property developer with a silver Rolls-Royce, offered ...”

“... lines distributed among ten stanzas – the sort of poetry mathematics of which Peter Reading, an admirer of Armitage’s work, is master), but altogether another to write 1000 lines to a year-end deadline, not least when attempting an essentially public poem which reflects on our times and recollects some recent headline-grabbing ...”

“... brought the mills of Lancashire to a halt for the best part of two years. As monumental New Delhi rose in Lutyens’s imperial splendour, Anglo-Indians anxiously decamped to the suburbs of London. The fate of the Empire mirrored the fate of the treaties. Despite the impressive appearance of permanence, every one of the major buttresses of that high-vaulted ...”

“... the fact that unemployment, the old bugbear of the Chirac years, was going up. During 2009 it rose from 7.8 to 9.6 per cent. More than 2.7 million people were out of work. The figure hasn’t changed much since then. In the first quarter of this year, France posted growth figures of 1 per cent, not as good as Germany’s 1.5 per cent but better than the ...”

“... before. Physical planning became something of a dirty word in this country, she explains, after Peter Hall and the other freedom-loving authors of ‘Non-Plan’ tried to prise Britain out of the rigidities of the postwar planning system at the end of the 1960s. But the results were not what they intended, propelling us down the free-market path and ...”

“... Chargaff, Jacob Bronowski, Gunther Stent, Brian Petley, and the trio of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In a modest ‘anti-Sokal’ hoax, one of the contributors to The One Culture?, Steven Shapin, leads the reader initially to assume that the quotations come from critics of science in the arts and humanities wing of C.P. Snow’s Two ...”

“... highlighted in numerous pessimistic analyses, including Colin Crouch’s Post-Democracy (2000) and Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void (2013). Trade union membership in the UK peaked at more than 50 per cent of the workforce in 1979, but has since declined to just 23 per cent. The mantra of ‘choice’ and ‘competition’ in public services, which was central to ...”

“... inexperienced driver’s grinding of the gearbox: ‘The servant pulls up another stool … Mesihi rose when he saw Michelangelo approaching and greeted him gracefully.’ Enard wasn’t an inexperienced writer even when the French original appeared in 2010, though it is his more recent success with Boussole, Goncourt Prize-winner in 2015 – translated as ...”

“... a ‘romanticism of no possible belief’. With this phrase the story changes tack: the word ‘Peter’ is abstracted from Petersburg and becomes the name of a character to whom frenzied love letters are addressed (the high-low speech of these letters, their lurches of logic and cadence, make them terrifically and authentically mad, as anyone who has ...”

“... in the changing world of post-war London: The Carlos restaurant was charming. It was panelled in rose mahogany, and had a high, pleasantly moulded ceiling. The tables were far apart, and there were shaded lamps on those near the walls. There were flowers on our table, three chrysanthemums, with curled pink and bronze petals, in a little silver-plated ...”

“... one exception, The Long Goodbye, his memorable writing was behind him. As Chandler’s reputation rose, his ability to work declined. Critical recognition did not make the writing easier. Worse yet, Cissy was suffering from a degenerative lung disease. Chandler cooked and kept house, taking care of his declining wife and sobering up to produce his penultimate ...”

“... course, which was a burden on everybody, despite the cartoons and all that guff, the play starring Peter O’Toole. Bernard was a nasty, jealous misogynist who found a perfect safe house at the Colony: so many of its regulars were nasty that your average woman-hater struggled to stand out. (He was also a ponce who stole people’s returns from the betting ...”

“... and learned to draw, and through another of the floating population at his parents’ home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender of Horizon, Craxton found a friend, an indulgent patron and a way into the avant-garde. He had a narrow brush with conscription, from which ...”

“... part of their overall philosophy of life. It is a shame that Danto chooses not to venture there. Peter Heller, a former professor of German and Comparative Literature, was analysed as a child by Anna Freud and paints a different picture of this era in his memoir. His mother was friendly with many left-wing analysts, and Heller remembers going on holiday with ...”