“... was a very different newspaper in 1986 from the one which fought for thalidomide children. When Andrew Neil became Rupert Murdoch’s surprise appointment as Sunday Times editor in 1983, almost his first act was to sack the editor of Insight, the centre of the paper’s investigative work in the previous two decades, and disband the team. The Insight rubric ...”

“... Andrew Maunder’s introduction to his new edition of Ellen Wood’s chronicle of scandalous goings-on among the Victorian middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the most famous unread works in the English language’. Very possibly. Yet it was spectacularly successful in its day, and its popularity has turned out to be more durable than that of most publishing sensations ...”

“... held for Gilles Deleuze (a ‘Christ among philosophers’). I learned a lot about her from Andrew Wilson’s biography, a book which strikes the right balance between empathy and critical distance. Wilson’s interpretations of her work, however, are often vapid. Can one really take seriously remarks such as: ‘Highsmith’s fiction, like Bacon’s ...”

“... train and in charge not only of this treasure but of a gang boss’s son. They have rescued the young man from a kidnapping, and what’s in the case is the unpaid ransom. Within minutes of the train leaving Tokyo, they have lost the case and the son is dead, so they are out of a job, or rather the only job left to them is … staying alive. They are a ...”

“... Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque. They include the Caravaggio Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, the two Tintorettos (Esther before Ahasuerus and The Muses) and the two Bassanos (The Adoration of the Shepherds and The Journey of Jacob); the Lovers attributed to Titian, the Correggio Holy Family, the Bronzino Portrait of a Lady in Green, the two ...”

“... a glorious happiness at least. We see her first in the 1920s, glowing among a group of friends, young women graduates with characters and destinies. She is easier with women ‘because she was much the handsomest of all’. Men are more difficult because ‘she wanted to be taken seriously’ and must be on her guard. She has realistic and womanly plans for ...”

“... a view of diverting the tedium of a ship at anchor’, four passengers, among them a young man called Munro, went ashore to hunt deer on Saugor Island. Another member of the party, Captain Henry Conran, described what followed in a letter to a friend: About half past three we sat down on the edge of the jungle, to eat some cold meat sent us from ...”

“... of junked cars. This is the Avery family’s salvage yard, where the incinerated remains of a young photographer called Teresa Halbach were discovered in November 2005. Steven Avery and his 17-year-old nephew Brendan Dassey were found guilty of Halbach’s murder in 2007, and both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Four years after the quashing of his ...”

“... third Sunday, the first of August, in the loveliest of all English cathedrals, ‘the church of St Andrew in Wells’, ‘wearing in his wand a piece of paper spread abroad containing in great text [very large letters] these words’:         CHARLTON THOMAS ODAM, FOR INCEST WITH   AUCHARETT WHITE HIS WIVES         DAUGHTER Odam had been ...”

“... Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill ...”

“... into the machine – and in the long term such people leak. Without doubt, the richness of the Andrew and Dilks collection owes much to such factors. Most of the essays are concerned with the 1900-45 period, and one learns of such fascinating byways as Japanese covert support for Russian socialist revolutionaries against the Tsar, and the intelligence ...”

“... immediately there was only one way to make it work – by getting the people who knew him talking. Andrew O’Hagan Michael Wood (film critic): Those working-class lads seemed to be everywhere in British films of the 1960s, grunting and sweating their way through the class system, using sex as a narrow and repressed form of guerrilla warfare. We are often told ...”

“... an American life as anything in Horatio Alger. Raised in grinding poverty, by the age of ten young Jack was up at three in the morning delivering newspapers to support his family. An autodidact, he mainly educated himself with books borrowed by the armful from Oakland Public Library. He left school at 14 to become a freebooting oyster pirate in the ...”

“... singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself defeated. He is not even ...”

“... Theoria, his 15th book, and was critic for the Sunday Telegraph. For the death of a relatively young art critic there was a surprising amount of obituary and tribute: ‘surprising’ because the British press has little interest in art and art criticism – coverage offered in the mainstream press is usually in the hands of one of the arts editor’s ...”