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“... his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest ...”

“... made a Royal Academician in 2005 but he has remained a quiet man of British art in comparison with David Hockney or R.B. Kitaj, his contemporaries at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. ‘Swan i’ (1964) The exhibition shows how decisively he transcends the well-worn term ‘postwar British artist’: Bowling is diasporic, resisting easy ...”

“... in the 1990s, the number of pigmented forms in each increased: in Just XVIII and That I, slim green marks descend against a pale grid, like a piano roll or punch-card. By the end of the following decade, her pigment drawings had exploded: the works of the 2000s are metres-wide map-like expanses in which the coloured forms have thinned down to sinuous ...”

“... of delicacy and miniaturism. Many of them are also ravishingly beautiful, from a simple green teapot, not previously exhibited, which had hardened curators sighing with delight at the press view, to a much reproduced if hardly ever seen set of paintings of 12 courtly beauties passing the time in various states of nervy languor. But even the huge ...”

“... the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy ...”

“... readers who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, who made the profitable discovery that his publication could double as an employment agency for mercenaries and a weaponry catalogue. The magazine’s classified ads offered an eclectic menu of ‘professional ...”

“... the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the BBC, the play got its perfect casting – Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at ...”

“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

“... in exile had attracted the attention of many non-professionals, most strikingly in the novels of David Malouf (An Imaginary Life, 1978) and Christoph Ransmayr (The Last World, 1988). Interest in exile as a subject has reinforced the relentless expansion of modern scholarship into former niche areas, and Ovid’s exile poetry has now become one of Latin’s ...”

“... David Storey’s new novel begins with a brief prelude reminiscent of The Rainbow’s, tracing the historical mutations of a locality from its natural to its urban (here 1930s) condition. The theme of the novel has other evident similarities with Sons and Lovers. Both deal with the emergence of artistic talent from working-class fetters ...”

“... gone wrong, renewed, consummated, young, forbidden, discovered, doomed, forgotten, repressed. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is the latest literary bestseller to hit the US (and, remarkably, the UK). Its surprising success owes much to the strength of its narrative, and something to the dynamics of contemporary bookselling and the vogue of the ...”

“... stasis, scattering, reconstruction – is typical of many libraries from the 17th century. David Pearson’s Book Ownership in Stuart England gives us a superlative tour of just about everything we might want to know about the early modern culture of book buying, borrowing, listing, shelving, storing and displaying. The ‘backbone’ of his ...”

“... two days. Then I bought and read in a similar manner – none took me any longer than two days – David Szalay’s three previous novels: London and the South-East (one of the great mocking titles, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, or Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration), The Innocent and Spring. I want to say that here is a ...”

“... the Oslo Accord suggest that much the same sort of thing was said there, while leaks from the Camp David summit in 2000 describe similar exchanges between Clinton, Barak and Arafat. In fact, the Israeli tone and attitude have barely changed since British despair led to the Palestine question being transferred to the UN at the end of the Second World War. The ...”

“... towards anything that smacks of modernisation. Croucher spies on lovers, dyes his enemies’ milk green, stuffs potatoes up their exhaust pipes: he disguises himself as a pest officer, a Greek Orthodox priest, a knapsacked botanist, a video librarian (who can transform enthusiastic commercials into Buñuel-like fantasies of gluttony and nausea). Croucher ...”