“... by his preliminary sketches, some of them so rough and full of energy they’re reminiscent of Frank Auerbach, though none of this dash survives into the finished portraits. Occasionally funny, too, particularly a sketch of Two Lovers Startled by a Young Person, a child gazing at a snogging couple.22 March. Good example of journalistic spite last week ...”

“... nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in 1918, records Joyce expressing his aim ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my ...”

“... rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an earlier generation of Tory modernisers, and a core group of Old Etonians and 1990s Central Office staffers, these men have set about giving the party ...”

“... of the Tuileries garden without anyone daring to stop him’.One of Malcolm’s touchstones is Michael Rocke’s Forbidden Friendships (1996), a study of Florence’s Office of the Night, which operated from 1432 until 1502. Over its seventy years, the anti-sodomy magistracy investigated as many as sixteen thousand men – among them Leonardo da Vinci ...”

“... defeated by the union block vote, until he became deputy leader shortly before his death thanks to Frank Cousins, the left-wing leader of the TGWU. His appointment to Attlee’s cabinet after the war can be seen as a concession to the party’s left. As editor of Labour’s house organ, Tribune, Bevan had become the left’s figurehead, and a more effective ...”

“... the phrase famously in Bleak House. Corton, however, finds it in the caption to an 1827 cartoon by Michael Egerton (her selection of London fog illustrators, from Cruikshank to David Langdon, adds entertainment and insight all through the book.)Corton salutes Dickens’s mastery of ‘the use of fog as extended metaphor’. And of course no fog in literature ...”

“... plastic replica of an actual revolver. The camera watches as police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback pull up in their patrol car. After two seconds, Loehmann begins shooting from the car. Tamir Rice was hit twice and died the next day in hospital. It turned out that the officers had arrived at the park with limited information. The Cleveland ...”

“... viable kingdom of the North between the Humber and the Forth-Clyde isthmus,’ the historian Frank Musgrove claimed in 1990. It wasn’t the best moment to use the present tense, even if there had been an upsurge in commentary on the ‘North-South divide’ over the previous decade. Tom Hazeldine suggests that the phrase ‘entered the political ...”

“... My contention would be that this is a large mistake and that Williams more nearly represents, as Michael Walzer puts it, ‘the failure of English political writing’. As usual, one glimpses the man best through his essays, a fair selection of which are published in Resources of Hope. It is fair to say that many of the essays in Resources of Hope blend into ...”

“... 1950s, Browning’s Kentish Sir Byng reappeared as Ezra Pound’s ‘Duke Liu’: Duke Liu, the frank, unhoused, unhapped, from bound to bourne put all barned corn in sacks and ration bags for glorious use, stretched bow showed shield, lance, dagger-axe and squared to the open road. Of course the Browningesque cadences are not replicated; they are a murmur ...”

“... had changed his mind about the authenticity of the ‘diaries’. Why, then, did he not inform Frank Giles, editor of the Sunday Times, who was left to hear the frightful news from Lord Dacre when his first edition was already on the trains? The Porter sections on political lying and fabrication provide essential evidence for the New Bullying. In that ...”

“... German critics; they concentrate rather selectively on minor and largely non-dramatic works. As Frank Trommler says in a sceptical Afterword (to my mind, the most perceptive part of the book), these essays show ‘to what a large degree his work is used as a vehicle for contemporary concerns, to what extent he is cast as a guru for artistic ...”

“... his subject. As a boy Wallace started out reading Hardy Boys mysteries and science fiction like Frank Herbert’s Dune; by the age of 11 he was mowing a neighbour’s lawn in exchange for a tutorial on Stendhal. It was around this time that his parents gave him his own television set. He watched everything: sitcoms, game shows, Star Trek, soap operas. Among ...”

“... a mother (Lena) who has been to America, who might have had a different life there, and a father (Michael) who periodically folds himself into the arms of the monks to dry out. There is the convent where Edna was educated, and the eyebrows of the nun she loved passionately there. There is also the changeable shape of her first husband, whom she met while ...”

“... are prime cases of holiday destinations with these unattractive qualities. The guides are frank, on the whole, about Morocco’s unlawful occupation of the Western Sahara, which has now been going on for more than twenty years with the result that at least 100,000 of the territory’s indigenous people are stranded in refugee camps in Algeria while ...”