“... she is merely being made forceful love to by a version of Pushkin’s Charsky (now an actor, who may have a part in the blind director’s Dr Zhivago, if his penis pleases). Meanwhile the rapist is being buggered by a young thug with Aids. All this lying together gets very complicated, especially as just a few pages ago Charsky was scaling the North Face of ...”

“... Like his predecessors, he is effectively without a job until the throne becomes vacant – which may not be until well into the next century. Meanwhile there is no longer an empire to provide him with the appropriate apprenticeship of a proconsular posting, and he is understandably eager to do more than accompany his wife on her shopping trips. But while his ...”

“... and the rest of it. Nevertheless, there is a disturbing feeling about that something irreversible may be happening in the world, and that it is not to Britain’s advantage. Simply put, the fear is that as geo-economics take over from geo-politics, Britain’s long day in the international sun may be waning; that we shall ...”

“... passage from Kenneth Burke’s Towards a Better Life: ‘But whereas, through fear of death one may desire to die, and may find all his interests converging upon this single purpose, such notions are loath to permeate the tissues, and the wish never to have been born is unknown to our organs and our senses.’ Presumably ...”

“... to Kurdistan. There are few sops to terrible beauty, whatever Kelly’s dust-jacket champions may say, and no excessive enthusiasm for the darker side of his material, either in the abandoned Iraqi torture chambers of Kuwait City or on the road to Basra. Michael Kelly is a remarkable war artist, however. His reports have an artist’s sense of ...”

“... and ‘surmise’ and is ever scrupulous – with her ‘quite possibly’s, ‘perhaps’s, ‘may have been’s – not to overstate the nature of her case. As far as I am concerned, the only test when offered such a conjecture is: is it interesting and plausible? The answer in this case is: yes on both counts. I am also perfectly ready to believe that ...”

“... expect to see power in the City of London becoming increasingly concentrated in Asian hands. This may seem a wild forecast, but twenty years ago who would have thought that before long nearly every newsagent’s in the whole of Greater London would be under Asian management? The Asian takeover of small trade – it’s hard to avoid the term ...”

“... schutterij by such artists as Bartholomeus van der Helst or Frans Hals. To the modern eye, Hals may appear to be satirising the militia, presenting their officers as knights of the knife and fork rather than the sword, better-equipped to do battle with the roast beef than with the Spaniards. I would not care to dismiss such an interpretation out of ...”

“... symbolic to Joseph Banks of paradise found (almost): ‘In the article of food these happy people may almost be said to be exempt from the curse of our forefather; scarcely can it be said that they earn their bread with the sweat of their brow when their chiefest substance Bread fruit is procured with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree and pulling ...”

“... back of a truck talking to a girl as the sun goes down.’ His attachment to quiet epiphanies here may strike us as a little dated: but perhaps it shouldn’t, since these are hardly period-specific pleasures. And one wouldn’t want to line up with the point-scoring American film critics of today, reviled by Wenders in the Introduction as lacking ‘modesty ...”

“... finds ‘a summer-like repose’ in accepting his fate, ‘a self-contained, irresponsible, devil-may-care indifference to the future as it looks to younger eyes; a feeling mat one’s bed is made, and no one can rest on it till it becomes necessary to go to bed forever ...’ This stoic pose is comically at odds with the histrionic player who over-reacted to ...”

“... combine (in the manner of DNA, as it were) to produce a boundless variety of understandings. Or it may be that psychoanalysis has merely provided us with an excuse to remain stuck in the revolving door of self-absorption. According to Deirdre Bair, ‘sex, the self and psychoanalysis’ are three of the concepts that have brought ‘sweeping societal ...”

“... greatly preferred the 16th-century Scots of Gavin Douglas: ‘Her nek schane like unto the rois in May.’ The rose in Virgil’s ‘rosea’ is completely suppressed in the marmoreal pallor of Dryden’s language, but the real offence is that ‘refulgent’. ‘Refulgent’ in English is ponderously classical; ‘refulsit’ to a Roman was an ordinary ...”

“... an interpreter to a high military officer of a Warsaw Pact country, then watch it.’ On 31 May 1944, Major Frank Thompson, wearing the British uniform that should have protected him, was captured along with the Bulgarian Partisans to whom he was attached, near Likatova, north of Sofia, found guilty at a staged trial, and publicly shot on 5 June. His ...”

“... we now admire and dislike in Ingres was, on the whole, admired and disliked from the first. It may be some comfort to Ingres, in whatever houri-filled heaven he occupies, to know that no one today is as rude about him as some of his contemporaries were. This is partly because he worries us less. We know there was no need to feel anxious lest his official ...”