“... rely on snippets quoted (probably out of context) by the Red Guards, who labelled him ‘China’s No 2 Party Person in Power Taking the Capitalist Road’. His Selected Works are heavily edited and much less quirky than those of Mao. Travelling in China in 1976, as the battle raged between Deng and the Gang of Four, I was handed a sheaf of unpublished ...”

“... The Saatchi Gallery, now to be found in the old County Hall building, spreads itself down long corridors and through ranks of offices. Many of these contain single works. Only in the big rotunda are a substantial number of pieces seen together – among them Damien Hirst’s very large anatomical model and Ron Mueck’s very small sculpture Dead Dad ...”

“... Everyone remembers what they were doing when John Kennedy was killed, but no one even asks what you were doing when Gerald Ford was President. The wonderfully comic, deviously historical premise of John Updike’s new novel is that someone asks ...”

“... merrily, gold watches glisten in the jewellers’ windows, but the faces are glum. There is no other point to the place except to enable wealthy folk to slide down the mountain into the shops and bars to spend their crisp Swiss francs. Except, that is, for one long weekend each year when two hundred people gather together in a ...”

“... Gallery basement, seventy-odd likenesses of the artist have been brought together. Its central hall, holding more than a dozen of the late self-portraits, compactly presents the case to be made for Rembrandt. The appeal of these paintings stems from our capacity to empathise with the subject. As we turn to the portraits, the subject’s eyes draw ours into ...”

“... have now been revised, expanded and tightened – although the speculative tone of the lecture-hall has been appropriately retained. Many other scholars have recently explored the development of the Church of England over the two long reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and one of Collinson’s achievements, executed with singular modesty and ...”

“... become the world’s first trillionaire. That means he will be worth a thousand billionaires. As John Allen Paulos demonstrated in his book Innumeracy, most of us have a poor grasp of what numbers on this scale mean; so take a second to guess, intuitively, what you think the difference in time is between a million seconds and a billion seconds. Ready? A ...”

“... little education, left off hairdressing and became a profession. The architects, by contrast, made no clean break between the art of building and its ancillary sciences. In the 18th century, as the profession emerged from its gentlemen-and-surveyors phase, it may have seemed that art had rules – that aesthetic and practical decisions were of the same ...”

“... John Hanbury Angus Sparrow (1906-92) was a devotee of the poetry of A.E. Housman. He wrote a vivid introduction to Housman’s verse, whose tight control, both of metre and of homosexual passion, found obvious echoes in his own character. Sparrow was also co-author of A.E. Housman: An Annotated Hand-List, one of the few excursions into modern bibliography made by this great collector, 17th century bibliographer and connoisseur of Renaissance Latin, who counselled aspiring bibliomaniacs: (1) never lend anyone a book; (2) never sell a book; (3) never give anyone a book; (4) never read a book ...”

“... John​ is one of more than 250,000 people in Britain living under the supervision of the probation service. He got out of prison in April 2018, when his sentence still had some years to run. I met him while I was reporting on the shortcomings of the law on joint enterprise. In 2005 he had been convicted for murder after a man died as a result of injuries received during a burglary John was involved in – injuries John did not inflict ...”

“... that these rebellions amount to much. They manifest themselves as the high seriousness of trivia (John Baldessari’s alphabetical list of the contents of his files of movie stills); as Native American bluster and vanity; as halfbaked intellectualism; above all, as the intoning of feminist and other contemporary cultural pieties. (Yvonne Rainer: ‘At this ...”

“... Bernard Crick writes, ‘to a girls’ boarding-school at Oxford, a decent enough place but by no means famous or front rank’. Forty-five years later I went, at nine, to a girls’ prep school, and then, at 12, to a girls’ public school, both of them boarding. Neither’s name is generally familiar or well-known, yet many of my ...”

“... to a Commons committee in 1993, ‘there has never been a system of union rights in Britain; no right to organise, no right to strike, no right to representation.’ Laybourn’s book describes the range of weapons used against British trade ...”

“... B. Priestley, G. Wilson Knight, George Steiner, Angus Wilson) have been booming the name of John Cowper Powys for many years, outraged that other big guns will not join the salute. In the first number of the Powys Review, in 1977, George Steiner blamed Dr Leavis for praising Theodore Francis Powys above ...”