“... atmosphere, but the dips below the surface – over his sexual frustrations, his loss of religious faith, the deaths of father and grandmother – never go very deep. The resolution of his frustrations was at least unconventional – he was deflowered by a glamorous aunt. The ‘hotel’ in which Audrey Peckham spent six excruciating months, before her trial ...”

“... the chiselled words seeming to embody in some powerful and menacing way the mysteries of faith. In the via Monserrato, a few weeks before the pope’s death, the light seemed yellow against the rain, and Rome seemed a place not of eternities but of passing trade. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor entered the restaurant in his civilian uniform of ...”

“... plates, which could slide over and alongside one another, as well as diverging. In 1967, Jason Morgan and Dan McKenzie independently worked out how these plates could move about the Earth, driven by Holmes’s mantle convection. Finally, in 1968, Xavier Le Pichon used this work, along with catalogues of the sites of earthquakes, to build a global map of ...”

“... melancholy empathy for an irrecoverable past, Communism is seen as ‘a doomed, flawed but noble faith’. But Samuel did not write his now reissued book until the 1980s, and then as an unhappy commentary on the disintegration of the Party he had left behind thirty years earlier. In fact, the disintegration of the movement has made possible the current flood ...”

“... to all-comers: Education, Healthcare, Ecology, Debt, Money out of Politics, Labour, the Commons, Faith, Political Oppression etc. At 4 p.m. the direct-action training began. The crowd broke into ‘affinity groups’, small bands that would, in theory, stick together on Monday morning, come what may. I was absorbed by the Bad Parents, named for a couple from ...”

“... the springboard for Jay McInerney’s breakthrough novel, Bright Lights, Big City, and Morgan Entrekin, the editor at Simon and Schuster who acquired Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero. Lish had the cult cred, but their properties shone the brightest. Gary and Morgan, ...”

“... years at Harvard, in which he becomes an unvalued disciple of his creative writing teacher, Morgan Ames, and his short stint at Balliol as a Rhodes scholar in which he does nothing but sink pints of bitter and have an unsatisfactory relationship with a girl called Eleanor – there is some enjoyable Anglophobia in this second half of the novel. At least ...”

“... and a subscription to a prurient polarity – virgins or whores.Fair enough: the defenders of the faith need some respite from maintaining the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel and the Protestant reformed religion established by law. God, then, returns the favour by being on hand to bless or chide when a decision is being made about the ...”

“... just as right-wing theorising about democracy itself began to change. Where there had once been a faith in the centralised state as an essential precondition for democratic government there was now a faith in market capitalism. This was increasingly regarded as a vital stage in the growth of democracy, and was thus to be ...”

“... need charity rather than violence; rather than hatred or anger; rather than protest; rather than faith. All these interpretations are possible but a bit heavy and more than a little confused. The shot itself as Johnny recites his quotation, the angle so low that we see a good piece of the ceiling, his face flattened as in a fresco, his left arm bandaged and ...”

“... or ‘hideous’ – ‘the choir chapels … are too hideous for words.’ We can see Morgan and Lily, he 16 and she a very senior 40, friends with a huge gap of age, respect and responsibility between them, nodding happily to each other as they came out with that verdict. At Cambridge three years later the heart is still in hiding, and apparently ...”

“... heirs have now abandoned. The first question is whether we can trust this text. The editor, Janet Morgan, with her experience of putting the later volumes of Diaries of a Cabinet Minister into shape, has adopted similar methods here. The original diaries run with some breaks from October 1951 to December 1963 – some three million words in all, reduced to ...”

“... we make our unfresh starts And share our instant chronicles. It’s your turn now. Edwin Morgan takes his turn with some flamboyance. His poems imagine things you wouldn’t think it necessary to imagine except to demonstrate what the mind can do, given half a chance. Imagine your flat is burgled, the burglar has cut his hand breaking the ...”

“... difficulty in answering his question,’ Schapiro told me. ‘I said the Beatus Apocalypse in the Morgan Library, and we then spent a morning looking at it.’ It was Schapiro’s view that the bands of colour that float free of the figures on some of its pages profoundly influenced Léger, and were the source of his couleur libre paintings of a few years ...”

“... half the babies of Vienna. ‘Notionally at least’ – that is the crux of the matter. ‘Faith’ in Greene is like the ‘story’: you take both on trust. But where does truth come in? Pinkie, the young gangster of Brighton Rock, has none of its necessary banality, and is designed to be merely Satanic, in the spirit of Conrad’s melodramatic ...”