“... perhaps Blake used the copper plate as a sketchpad, as Peter Ackroyd suggests in his biography. Michael Phillips’s replicas of the original plates testify to the artist’s industry and also to the devotion of modern Blakeans. The lay observer can hardly bear to contemplate the toil involved in all that neat, packed engraving, let alone in having to do ...”

“... Princess Diana? It’s pretty much a case of choose your own conspiracy theory, unless you’re Michael Burgess, Coroner of the Queen’s Household, whose tedious task it now is to ascertain the manner of Diana’s death. Entirely by coincidence, Burgess will also preside over the inquest into the death of Dodi Fayed, because Fayed is buried on the family ...”

“... began to make a play of them. One page of Naked City (1945), his first collection, displays a pure black rectangle. A reproduction of a fully developed sheet of blank photographic stock, it is captioned: ‘This is unexposed film of Greenwich Village because nothing ever happens there.’ Perry Scholes, the protagonist and narrator of ...”

“... sort of skull-hugging mask last seen on 1970s wrestlers. And again in all-over polka-dot fur, in black-and-white clown face, head like a cracked Alien egg with waxy black rivulets running from the crown. The one exquisitely wearable thing he made was for a Blitz magazine feature in 1986: a Levi’s denim jacket covered ...”

“... she was being literal as well as figurative. A pen was what she wrote with. Dan Jacobson’s and Michael Frayn’s reliance on, respectively, a word processor and a tape recorder needn’t be put down to Post-Modern self-consciousness. Novels naturally like to keep up with the technology on which they rely, but an appeal – however disingenuous – to ...”

“... tricks.’ PC Paul Berry, a serving officer, said he had seen one of the men with a cut lip and a black eye. His evidence, said the judges, ‘does not help the appeal’. Two officers from Winson Green Prison at the time the men were admitted, Peter Bourne and Brian Sharp, gave evidence that the men were marked with injuries when they first came to the ...”

“... trade’. The picture shows Wittgenstein walking down the street with a young man wearing a black raincoat. It was originally published in Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten, edited by Michael Nedo and Michele Ranchetti, with the caption: Wittgenstein mit dem Freund Ben Richards in London. In the article I ...”

“... debt. She was seen. At first glance it seemed a very young and slender girl, dowdily dressed in black and wearing a small, close fitting black bonnet: she might have been a milliner’s assistant ... or a poorly paid governess hurrying to her pupils. As I drew near the pavement the girl looked up and I all but sat flat ...”

“... division, of attraction and repulsion, and much of it seemed (to later philosophers) a chaos: a ‘Black Death’ or a ‘Walpurgis-nightmare’. The moral psychology which Romantic duality promoted, and which, in Herdman’s account, scientific psychology naturalises through a cerebral anatomy, wants its independence – not least from psychology as its own ...”

“... feeling: ‘good furniture’, ‘good paintings’, ‘such a good part of London’, ‘The black risotto is outstanding, if you like good things.’ His protagonists are people of the utmost discrimination, and yet they are able to take correspondingly little comfort from it. If anything, it seems to be a further source of danger to them: Adam, in A ...”

“... around, the decay of the guild-dominated constitutions some cities had worked out after the Black Death, a hangover from a period of rapid growth and immigration, a tendency for prominent families to move out to rural estates and go county, distortions arising from the multiply-caused ‘price revolution’ or inflation of the 16th century, shifts away ...”

“... homosexual orgy; James Dean being roped in for a one-night stand; Zsa Zsa Gabor getting her famous black eye from Hutton-fancier Rubirosa (after whose magnificent appendage smart restaurants named their giant pepper mills). Curiously blind to her family firm’s exploitation, Barbara launched many philanthropic schemes in Tangiers, where hangers-on cashed in ...”

“... and was married to a Māori woman, I didn’t hear about Ahi Kaa until the mid-1980s. Sebastian Black, a colleague of mine at the University of Auckland, had moved in next door with his long-time partner, the historian Judith Binney. In September 1986, Sebastian told me that Judith was warned by one of her Māori students that a group called Ahi Kaa was ...”

“... me is also walking: if I stop, he stops; if I run, he runs. I turn around: no one. Everything is black, there is no exit, and I turn and turn corners that always lead to the street where no one waits for me, no one follows, where I follow a man who trips and gets up and says when he sees me: no one. The later version of this story is better known, and much ...”

“... Tangier Assignment. A toothbrush. A book titled Psycho-Cybernetics. An inhaler. A hand mirror. Black shoe polish. Someone reading this piece might say: ‘So? A list of personal effects? What’s the big deal?’ Well, it’s the limits, and the pathos. It might be budget astronaut equipment. The apprehensive emphasis on personal care. Is it vanity or ...”