“... doesn’t mention whether or not he had seen Emmer’s famous 1950 feature Domenica d’Agosto.) His activity began to annoy: using the simple materials to hand, particularly available light only, the young man was producing images which didn’t appear to his bosses to be giving a sufficiently glamorous or polished account of the revolutionary ...”

“... to rise during the period of suspense that ends just before the grand dinner at Stationers’ Hall; the winner gets an extra bonus of more sales; and the sponsors presumably do at least as well out of the enterprise as they would by spending the same amount of cash on cricket or golf. Although Booker has a financial ...”

“... and valuers, who submitted the stamp to the Royal Philatelic Society. On 30 January 1931, Thomas Hall, president of the Society, signed Certificate 14,764 of the Expert Committee, on which was written: ‘This stamp is a variety unchronicled and hitherto unknown to the Expert Committee. Having regard to the lapse of time since this stamp was issued, the ...”

“... to embed herself within networks of mutually supportive artists and thinkers. Her paintings of David Garrick and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, made in Rome early in her career, helped to establish her fame in Britain, where she moved in 1766. Shortly after she arrived, her portrait was painted by Joshua Reynolds, soon to be president of the Royal ...”

“... Charing Cross Road, we had been interrupted by a foam-flecked out-patient yelling: ‘How often do you sleep with prostitutes?’) But even now, at some level, I couldn’t accept it: that this courteous and sharp-witted lady was the one who had been, rather reluctantly, photographed with Neal Cassady, and who had herself been responsible for some of the ...”

“... In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before ...”

“... death in 1774 stories of his ‘absurdities’ multiplied: he was ‘little Goldy’, Dr Minor to Johnson’s Dr Major, the Sancho Panza of English literature, ‘an idiot in the ways of the world’, an ‘anomalous character’, envious, blundering, clownish. James Prior’s full, scholarly biography, designed ...”

“... through the play that made Stoppard famous. The two main characters are homesick. In escalating, hall-of-mirrors, Chinese-dolls Stoppardian fashion, this observation throws light on the drama from which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern springs, and which turns from being the main thing to a subplot, becoming a play within a play. The echo of ‘home’ in the ...”

“... one defect. As Mr Wilson pointed out next morning, he hadn’t travelled to London by train. He’d made the journey by car. Harold, on the other hand, was careful not to deny the overall sense of the Crossbencher paragraph: namely, that he did indeed think he could become Leader of the Labour Party. He had been in very little doubt about that matter from the ...”

“... angels going up and down a stairway to heaven, and I can still see their white robes as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil wash. One of those long summer days, my friend David and I got caught after stealing powdered floor cleaner from the local supermarket and pouring a huge mound of it in a doorway. The ...”

“... Before my appointment​ with the albatross, I’d planned to draw it differently. We first met through glass: the skeleton was in a cabinet in the museum, displayed on a high shelf. If you looked up and dodged the reflections you could see the curved sweep of its beak and the Z-shaped slashes of its vast folded wings ...”

“... been the biggest invasion in human history, dwarfing even the Normandy landings. In this case, D-Day was to be 1 November 1945. An American army of five million men was to be assembled for the invasion of Japan, with smaller but still significant contingents from Britain, Australia and the rest of the Commonwealth. Despite an unprecedented advance ...”

“... to work out why original sin, even in its secular versions, was an idea we should not be trying to do without. And clearly no modern writing has yet been able to do without a version of it, whether as something to be acknowledged or as something to be defied. The problem of original sin, secularised as the problem of ...”

“... cinema barely five minutes away with multiple screens and a grown-up programming policy. I’d be free to go in the afternoon all alone (an old movie-going treat) or in company of an evening. But I don’t. I notice a film that I think might be good, and then shake my head at the idea of actually going to see it. The risk of disappointment is too ...”

“... I’m sure this is because actors don’t moonlight as critics in the way novelists or writers do. Few writers are reviewers tout court, most having other jobs as novelists, historians, biographers or whatever, and writing reviews simply because they need or want the money. It’s harmless enough but it makes literature a nastier world. 8 January. Reading ...”