“... animal cunning; the son takes her side and does the necessary (‘It’s up to me to be the man of the house’), but she is allowed only two poems to voice her own complaints. It is left to her son to do most of the accusing: It was a fugitive childhood. Aged four, I was chased round and round the table by my father, who fell and broke his arm he was ...”

“... men might be more interesting than their books his book was definitely more interesting than its man. Conversely, there are good writers who are nonetheless more interesting to read about than to read, and Mrs Gaskell is one of them. Few Victorians would have been more agreeable to encounter, less likely to disappoint, intimidate, or merely bore. She was ...”

“... and when I’d return, he wouldn’t even have noticed that I’d been gone.’ Sartre wrote to de Beauvoir that Huston ‘shuns thought because it makes him sad’. How could he work, he asked, with a man who had told him his unconscious was a big void? One senses that their mutual dislike was physical. Sartre, the ...”

“... d’Estissac helped him study medicine. Jean du Bellay, the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, was a man with the ear of Francis I, a friend of Thomas Cromwell, a defender of the Henrican divorce, a sympathiser with many of Luther’s doctines and an admirer of Melanchthon. He protected Rabelais as author and employed him as doctor. Rabelais was ...”

“... Once upon​ a time, in the good old days of Walter Benjamin, I thought of writing a book called Paul Cézanne, A Portrait Painter in the Era of High Positivism. Its question would have been: How do human beings offer themselves to ‘portrayal’ in a culture where they understand themselves, and expect others to understand them, as ...”

“... and the Pethick Lawrences travelled hundreds of miles to a remote dorp in the Karoo, Hanover or De Aar, to hear her opinions. Her oratory to congresses summoned during the Boer War to protest against British farm-burning tactics was described by one observer as ‘transfigured’: ‘I have heard much indignant eloquence, but never such a molten torrent of ...”

“... rifles and now count paperclips – draw up plans for when the Germans walk in and become the de facto power. Who is dropping the bombs? Is it the Germans, or is it the English, aiming to discredit the Germans? Half-hidden in the murk engendered by censorship, turf smoke and the fog which is the habitual climate of the novel, mysterious parcels of rumour ...”

“... in the Louvre, was published for the first time in 1930: it had been catalogued as ‘une dalle de marbre, envoyée de Nazareth en 1878’. This document is an imperial edict forbidding under penalty the violation of sepulchres; and experts in Greek epigraphy put the lettering in the first century of our era. The Nazareth ...”

“... the Poor People’s March of socialists and anarchists. The cops far outnumbered the protesters. A man with a megaphone and a black plastic boot on his head addressed the police: ‘They’ve got you dressed up like turtles.’ The turtles kettled the marchers to the east. I heard a libertarian carrying a Ron Paul sign ...”

“... woman with both gymnastic gusto and a sophisticated bon goût. There was the Plump and Horny Older Man, of course: the notorious hack writer and journalist, Henri Gauthier-Villars, better known to posterity as ‘Willy’, whom Colette married in 1893 soon after coming to Paris from her native Burgundian village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. Willy (as his nom ...”

“... course of Breathless, in the scene where the small-time gangster Michel Poiccard, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, dives into a cinema on the Champs Elysées in order to shake off a wearisome tail. The film which is up on the screen turns out to be Budd Boetticher’s Westbound, one of the Randolph Scott cycle, although the voice that we hear on the soundtrack ...”

“... managerial adroitness is described, much more effectively than he describes it himself, by Eric de Bellaigue in British Book Publishing as a Business since the 1960s. Cape resisted the tide of conglomeration by a series of ad hoc alliances (‘Hanseatic alliances’, as de Bellaigue calls them) with other similarly sized ...”

“... century; that it was painted in Spanish Town, the colony’s capital; and that it showed a man called Francis Williams, about whom Long had written a whole chapter in his celebrated History of Jamaica (1774). Not only that, he says, but when Long was writing that chapter, he had this painting in front of him and was describing it. The dealer, Jack ...”

“... story from my mother at an early age, when I was told that the alleged messiah was a confidence man, a scoundrel, one of the real villains of Jewish history. There was a period of a century or more after the events themselves when blame and then more blame was heaped on the pretended messiah and his leading propagandist, Nathan of Gaza. New research in the ...”

“... seem to be preoccupied by gender. It is a theme crucial equally to Duncan McLean’s novel Bunker Man and to Kathleen Jamie’s poetry collection The Queen of Sheba. It is insistent in W.N. Herbert’s poem ‘Featherhood’ and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David ...”