“... back their dead – in fishing boats, or rolled up in carpets – rather than let them lie in a corner of a foreign field, however much ‘a body of England’s’ might consecrate and alter its character. But since then, the exact place of death has taken hold of people’s imaginations: wayside shrines spring up, with cards and messages and bouquets and ...”

“... of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a ...”

“... I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into yet another corner, this time for keeps … The perception that knowing you’re dying makes you feel more alive is an error. I’m less alive. There’s less life to lead. I can’t give 100 per cent attention to anything – part of me is thinking about my health.There ...”

“... us, we have never acquired the adult mind.’ 18 February. Ned Sherrin’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. A friendly service interspersed with songs, some from Sondheim, some from Sherrin and Brahms, but with none of them as tuneful as the hymns. The audience is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson ...”

“... fun in ‘funeral’, to try to replicate the wit and ebullience that’s invariably around the corner in Duke’s jungle.The union of the blues and Chopin is a great moment, Miley leading the ensemble from one musical strain into another as seamlessly as Brancusi carving each subsequent serration on his King of Kings or Ellington swinging Tchaikovsky’s ...”

“... the talk after the viewing trying to find out why, along with The Seventh Seal, Le Mépris, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, it was considered a marvel, and why Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, charming though it was, failed because it was self-indulgent. Self-indulgence was very often the reason for a film or play to fail in the eyes of Doris and her ...”

“... who did not save his life. The end of the book is devoted to hopes for the vaccine and efforts to corner Bill into delivering it, all to no avail. The narrator has been told that the vaccine is no longer effective if the patient has fewer than 200 T-cells; on the last page of the book the narrator has hit 200 and Bill has vanished. (The scandal caused by ...”

“... Balloon glass aloft. ‘He nearly did make it. In fact he just barely may have his own particular corner in the temple of fame. In a brush box? On a shelf? In a nook behind a side, side, side-altar, bearing a rumpled linen cloth, with one electric candle bulb askew? We often prophesied it for one another. In, precisely, January 1932, he achieved a ...”

“... it to Pennsylvania, which was probably just as well. (In his shaggy-dog history of ideas, Madoc, Paul Muldoon imagines the high-minded debacle that would have ensued had they ever got there.) Fiery Southey grew cooler and cooler. He began by suggesting that the party might perhaps work up to the full American dream by way of a small farm in Wales (Coleridge ...”

“... statutory feet, he puts on his glove again, saying: ‘If you should need me I’m just round the corner’ (i.e. in Arlington House). I ask Miss S. how long she has had the van. ‘Since 1965,’ she says, ‘though don’t spread that around. I got it to put my things in. I came down from St Albans in it and plan to go back there eventually. I’m just ...”

“... hug the wall.’ And so he sets off, charting a course from his desk towards a painting hung in a corner, and from there he continues obliquely towards the door, but is waylaid by his armchair, which he sits in for a while, poking the fire, daydreaming. Then he bestirs himself again, presses north towards his bed, the place where ‘for one half of our ...”

“... stood at a party watching the ever watchable Sontag, who had taken command of the opposite corner of the salon. She was showing us her profile, standing with her arms folded, swathed in scarves, her black mane accented by that theatrical streak of white, scanning the room for traitors.’ What the portraits seldom captured was a quality obscured by ...”

“... up from school or collecting a pizza. How do traffic bosses ensure that 800 limousines get to the corner of Hollywood and Highland at exactly the right time? If they fail, and there will be a concatenation of failures before they succeed, an international audience of millions will lose their faith in Hollywood. So: ‘The limos are starting to back ...”

“... condition.’ Instead he studied psychology and sociology, and began a correspondence with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work – especially his Réflexions sur la question juive – impressed him for its commitment to the ‘bloody concrete of the world of men’.In 1949, Memmi returned to Tunis with his wife, Marie-Germaine Dubach, a Catholic from Alsace, and ...”

“... axis, and how under-noticed it has been on the other, that would surely be in the top right-hand corner, an outrageous failure that in a well-functioning society would be guaranteed to bring down the government and trigger reform of the Treasury and procurement systems. Instead, the person at the head of the machinery which supervised, or failed to ...”