“... He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy jacket and the wide-collared white shirt, open to the sternum. He holds a book, closed around his index finger, which is still marking the place. It is as if he has agreed to stop reading for just a moment, so that the photo can be taken. He stares straight at the camera and his expression ...”

“... flatness. Reports from Europe were bound to dismay people with sensitivity to suffering. Young Christopher Mayhew, scion of a country-house family, former President of the Oxford Union, but soon to be a Labour MP, had reached Germany as a soldier in March. His father, Sir Basil, vice-chairman of Colman of Norwich, didn’t like what his son wrote home ...”

“... in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The editors promise to ‘elucidate the difficulties’ of Eliot’s work by tracing every possible verbal overlap between the words used in his poems and the words used by other writers, both famous and obscure, in texts that ...”

“... Green told his interviewer that ‘the writer must be disengaged’, and enjoyed pointing out that Christopher Isherwood, who called Living ‘the best proletarian novel ever written’, had never worked in a factory himself. Pontifex’s own employees, having rumbled the fact that Yorke and Green were the same, weren’t so impressed. ‘I read your ...”

“... contemporary designer ‘signed’ as many cityscapes as Norman Foster? Perhaps no architect since Christopher Wren has affected the London skyline so dramatically, from the Swiss Re ‘gherkin’ to the new Wembley Stadium arch. Foster has a right to be immodest, and the Catalogue of his work is punctuated with adjectives like ‘first’ and ...”

“... persisted in the Communist underground opposition to Stalin. Long before Solzhenitsyn, as Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2011, ‘the crucial questions about the Gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat ...”

“... and out of place. Against the trace of the hills on the opposite shore, a spot grew into a wide white ferry, the Murzuk, registered in Libya, sidling up to the pier. Rust climbed up its hull like a rash. The crush of bodies against the rails reminded me of the last time I saw a Libyan vessel, just as overloaded, pulling into Valletta from Benghazi and heavy ...”

“... thinking of herself lovely in age: ‘I’d a face would be a great wonder when it’ll have soft white hair falling around it.’ In turn, Martin dreams of the ‘beautiful, long, white, silken, streamy beard’ he’ll grow. Challenged by the returning saint with the beauties of the actual world, Martin counters with the ...”

“... under an umbrella dressed in a faded denim shirt and a pair of ancient, stained trousers, his white hair immaculately whipped above a face somewhat hidden by a pair of huge Imelda Marcos dark glasses – this combination of tremendous care and inattention the style of a Sicilian mafioso, his patrician composure suggestive of Burt Lancaster playing ...”

“... for Schlegel and his friends. They discovered it in the tranquillity of the Moreel triptych, St Christopher in the stream bearing Christ, which they saw in the Musée Napoléon in Paris where it had been taken from Bruges. That was not the first time a work of his was made hostage to military action. Though Memling’s art might appear to be outside ...”

“... much in concert with his two principal competitors – Alexander Clifford of the Daily Mail and Christopher Buckley of the Daily Telegraph – this was something they normally achieved, although at times they went one better by occupying the former enemy commander’s former villa. He was lucky enough, in fact, to live in the golden age of the war ...”

“... stale, unreal, unconfident, artificial, class-ridden. And that no doubt was the case; although, as Christopher Innes pointed out in his chapter on Rattigan in Modern British Drama 1890-1990, the two situation comedies are very similar. Of course, Osborne’s style of making a fuss was a new thing in the theatre; Rattigan’s characters were schooled to keep a ...”

“... plane dropped its bombs fifty yards away. Instead of a loud bang and flying shrapnel, there was white smoke, in the midst of which were glowing shapes, the size of tennis balls – perhaps ten of them – drifting towards him. It was before masks, before awareness, but Mr Karimi ran away. He tripped and fell over, and breathed in a gulp of gas as he got to ...”

“... at the end of the three-day Irish Episcopal Conference last March, by the bishop of Elphin, Christopher Jones, a member of the Bishops’ Liaison Committee for Child Protection, who accused the media of being ‘unfair and unjust’: ‘Could I just say with all this emphasis on cover-up, the cover-up has gone on for centuries, not just in the Church ...”

“... If the new bunch have a distinguishing trait, it is born-again brazenness. In an analysis of Christopher Hitchens and his historic predecessor in the craft, George Orwell, in the LRB (23 January 2003), Stefan Collini coined a superb descriptive phrase: what the reborns stand for is ‘the "no-bullshit” bullshit’ of anti-liberalism, re-equipped with ...”