“... both guying and gratifying his fellow countrymen’s propensity to declare, in the words of the Paul Anka song popularised by Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way.’ Thomas, however, construed these lines personally, as a challenge not only to his dithering, but also to his involuntary sense of poethood, in which choice, he insisted, played no part. ‘It is ...”

“... on ‘The Meaning of Ukrainian Pluralism for the Future of Europe, Russia and the World’, Paul Berman and François Heisbourg kept returning to the idea of Russia as a home for a kind of clerical nationalism, Ukraine as the battleground for liberal values. Were these grand visions, I wondered, actually playing into Putin’s hands? The Kremlin was ...”

“... terms [of COFA].” In the last year and a half, that changed.’I left for Nan Madol with Paul David, another guide from the tourist office. We drove out of Kolonia along the island’s ring road – the complete circuit takes three hours – much of which is lined with single-storey houses, some painted in bright colours and all with a ...”

“... projects. But they do help to explain why Nepalese manufacturers have been so unsuccessful, why hill agriculture is withering, why Nepal is a minor dumping-ground for medical drugs, drinks and tourists. It is an incomplete explanation, which does not take the international politico-economic context of Nepal into account. Thirdly, there are the social and ...”

“... the Thames by the foot-passenger ferry, and strolling past Pope and Swift’s old hangout, Marble Hill House, I began to feel progressively unburdened. By the time we were trolling up the long grim suburban avenue that links the River Crane to Feltham I was entering a familiar blissful zone: every manky, run-down semi we passed seemed imbued with profound ...”

“... his best-known script is notorious for all the wrong reasons: The Canyons, directed by Paul Schrader, a Hollywood thriller pairing the improbable team of Lindsay Lohan and porn stud James Deen. Deen acquitted himself quite well, giving a more convincing, noirish performance than Lohan, whose tardiness and wayward lurches were chronicled in an ...”

“... A fortnight later, the Coldstreamers found themselves raked by gunfire near the summit of a wooded hill. Dazed by malaria, Lieutenant Christopher Bulteel witnessed men leaping from blazing fires; stick grenades being hurled from previously invisible trenches; and sickening scenes of hand-to-hand fighting. As Bulteel and his comrades withdrew, it began raining ...”

“... first to be held in Africa – was organised largely by African American women, including Sylvia Hill, who went on to become a dogged anti-apartheid activist.This new shorthand Pan-Africanism has little in common with the compelling political programme that survives today as a set of interlocking cultural assumptions – in the Caribbean, Africa and the US ...”

“... are doing it. The founding legend of rave concerns the ‘Ibiza Four’: the DJs Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, who in 1987 went on holiday to Ibiza, took Ecstasy under the stars at the open-air club Amnesia, and watched DJ Alfredo play an unusually eclectic mix of pop, new wave, disco and US house as the sun came up. They ...”

“... Discarded alternatives are seen, in rapid flashes of irony. There are several glimpses of Paul von Joukowsky’s 1882 design for the Grail Temple; and although Syberberg’s Gurnemanz is evidently in his thirties, Kundry is at one point seen contemplating a sacra-like bundle of old puppets – one of them very like Emil Scaria’s original ...”

“... the $100 spanner, or the $1000 toilet seat, or about having an Assistant Secretary of Defense (Paul Thayer) in jail – these are the mere ephemera of an administration utterly devoted to pouring hundreds of billions of dollars towards Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, General Dynamics, Martin Marietta and so on. Even though there’s no money to pay for ...”

“... in the tenth century to explain the incredibly complicated history of a piece of land at Font-hill in Wiltshire. This has already been decided, he protests. We took it to your father, King Alfred: ‘And the king stood in the chamber at Wardour – he was washing his hands. And when he had finished, he asked Aethelhelm why what we had decided did not seem ...”

“... a while emotionally oppressive, and book a flight to San Francisco, really just so as to see a hill. True, there is a northern area called the Heights, which sounds as if it ought to be the Hampstead of Houston, but the altitude in question turns out to be a mere 23 feet: not enough to notice, at least until a tropical storm comes in and the rest of the ...”

“... of Bernard is topographical: a footpath here, a tramline there, a series of rings to suggest a hill. Freud maps Bernard’s head as if prospecting – for thoughts, perhaps. ‘That’s lucky,’ Freud murmured when making an etching of Martin Gayford’s head. ‘A form has appeared which I am delineating. It is always there, but it doesn’t always show ...”

“... proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben Nicholson, Betjeman and all the stuff to do ...”