“... on the slopes of Richmond Hill as opposed to the ones on top, and he had draped it with black to mark the death of Gladstone. The Fairfields, though they did not agree with his sentiments, were again very civil and ‘smoothly expressed their sympathy’, though once round the corner they voiced their fears that ‘the good little man would probably lose ...”

“... into his own that enabled Forster to get over his difficulties, finish A Passage to India, ‘and mark the fact with Mohammed’s pencil’, as he recorded in his diary. The final achievement of the novel’s writing has something of the ‘slow crystallisation’ that Marguerite Yourcenar describes in Cavafy’s poetry. The ‘Greek gentleman in a straw ...”

“... if it was ‘mature’, a word always on the lips of tutors and graduate assistants: mature art ‘rose above the passions of faction’; mature people ‘accepted society as it was and didn’t seek to alter it’ (in a spirit of Christian or Eliot-like resignation); mature judgment was ‘objective’ or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion ...”

“... centipede . . . In the desert we cannot find food and water for him. The villagers say that white mark on his nose will bring bad luck. It will make us die.’ ‘But you are not superstitious.’ ‘No I’m not. We will be more free without the mule. You do not understand Iran. If people see us without the mule, they will treat us better.’ We saw a man ...”

“... Thompson thought that was a short distance; she certainly never visited. Mabey is closer to the mark when he writes that she lacked the ‘skills of empathy and character development and plot construction necessary for a sustained work of fiction’. Lark Rise succeeds in part because it has no real plot; her best writing was recounting. Her powers of ...”

“... Norwalk, Ohio would probably fail. Suddenly strapped for credit – courtesy of Tappan’s black mark – Beardsley took the Agency to court, where the lascivious details came tumbling out. Mrs Beardsley had indeed moved out of the house, filed for divorce, and accused her husband of adultery with seven women, including a mother-daughter pair. When ...”

“... But it’s done with enough brio not to degenerate into an academic exercise, and the question-mark over the narrator’s real identity is skilfully managed. So, too, is the oddly touching relationship that develops between captive and captor, whose curiosity about one another is obliquely compared to Proust’s narrator’s obsession with ...”

“... certainly a factor and so surely was jealousy. Annan’s military career had been brilliant; he rose rapidly through the Joint Intelligence Staff, becoming a colonel and an OBE at 29. Runciman’s war was odder and less distinguished. Guy Burgess, his first pupil at Cambridge, recommended him in 1940, on the strength of his linguistic skills, for the post ...”

“... contacts, not to mention a bounty of amazing beasts: wild mustangs from the American businessman Mark Dunham, panthers loaned by the animal exhibitor Carl Hagenbeck, three polar bears presented by a besotted Grand Duke Mikhailovich (the bears were said to pose on request).It​ is hard to exaggerate Bonheur’s fame in the mid-19th century, or the adulation ...”

“... mirror up to them, in the tawdry and convoluted intrigues of The Jew of Malta, performed at the Rose Theatre in February 1592, a few weeks after his deportation from Flushing. So we have these two spies or projectors, these two Richards or Dicks, and their apparent recollections of Marlowe’s blasphemies. They closely corroborate one another on the ...”

“... a celebration in the Sistine Chapel on 23 June with the pope and two hundred honoured guests, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the contemporary and modern art collection at the Vatican Museums. I am somehow one of these two hundred; either that, or it is a trap. ‘I think if you’re invited to meet the pope, you go,’ Jason tells me. ‘It will make a ...”

“... about them even more than it does about Chaplin. They were nervous and resourceful fighters who rose from the bottom and never forgot it, and they deployed the slapstick aggressions of everyday life as a coarse stimulant and a way of gaining private ends. At the request of Kaufman and Irving Berlin, the producer of The Cocoanuts, Sam Harris, agreed one day ...”

“... noisily inferior works ‘filled with bombastic rhetoric and “patriotic” excesses’ that ‘mark the nadir of his artistic career’. Such works as Wellington’s Victory and several compositions written for the Congress of Vienna belong to the same period as the revisions to Leonore that resulted in the 1814 Fidelio. Solomon suggests that this ...”

“... Syrie stayed in London, where she was taking a profitable interest in interior design (a reliable mark of bad character in her husband’s later books). They were divorced in 1929: ‘Glad to be rid of her at last,’ Meyers writes, ‘Maugham threw in the chauffeur with the Rolls.’ There were further travels, further books. The world-famous Maugham persona ...”

“... didn’t work for him, and so wouldn’t be covered; researchers and secretaries, like the woman Mark Garnier sent to the sex shop, work for individual MPs, not for Parliament: if they have a complaint, the Equality Act stipulates that it has to be taken up first with their employer, who’s quite possibly the culprit, before they can appeal to an employment ...”