“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... a yawn.’ More equality is a good thing and it’s an idea that’s worth defending. It would be nice if there were more politicians willing to stand up and defend it, however they saw fit. That may be wishful thinking. But so too is the idea of an evidence-based politics, which just opens the door to all the prevarications of joined-up ...”

“... In 1981, the last time a Zweig revival was plotted, it failed; this time, with Pushkin Press’s nice paper and pretty formats and with new translations by the excellent Anthea Bell,* it seems to be succeeding – John Fowles (a representatively Anglo-Saxon e and u crossbreed) wrote: ‘Stefan Zweig has suffered, since his death in 1942, a darker eclipse ...”

“... Ticket to Ride, to get personally involved in the same news other people watch on TV – which is nice, but it won’t pay the rent, and people who can’t pay their rent in the Eighties are going to be in trouble. We are into a very nasty decade, a brutal Darwinian crunch that will not be a happy time. Doc’s always said that when the going gets weird the ...”

“... sweet souls such as old Mrs Carr who looked like a ‘very benevolent and nervous ghost’, with a nice husband who said: ‘ “We daren’t leave Mrs Carr at home because she is so mischievous – so we have to take her with us.” But he got her in the drawing-room and took her hand gently when no one was looking.’ He had as keen an eye for a ceremony as ...”

“... had not been a particularly intellectual woman, or, according to some witnesses, a particularly nice one. Whether Lewis mostly worshipped her or mostly suffered her, or both or neither, we don’t really know. He began by needing her and ended by looking after her; perhaps it was not such an unusual relationship. In 1926 Lewis began a friendship that was to ...”

“... man who rammed his car into her, weaponising his vehicle just as jihadists have done in London and Nice and Barcelona. A helicopter surveilling the event crashed, killing the two officers inside. Dozens were injured. The ‘Unite the Right’ protest was a reminder that the dream of the Confederacy has never died: the vision of Herrenvolk democracy has ...”

“... Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, Marie of the Incarnation and Madame Guyon – what could overlap more completely with my interests? Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David ...”

“... in a box in 1934; it appeared in English in book form in 1960, thanks to the patient labours of Richard Hamilton, who also constructed a precise copy of the Large Glass, which Duchamp signed, for the Tate. The notes tell us, among other things, that the Bride is a motor, or more precisely the ‘timid potency’ of a motor, and also that she is a ‘tank of ...”

“... body is agile and youthful. I’ve seen her naked, and it’s all natural.’ It would be nice to know exactly how many people in the audience were thinking: ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.’ In any case: ‘She looks better with her clothes off than on . . . The little woman is perfect, vertically and horizontally.’ The party cost ...”

“... passed around the back seat of my school bus in the early 1970s, along with Dennis Wheatley, Richard Allen and Sven Hassel; it has had the sort of extended cultural life most writers can only dream of, from early plans to involve the Beatles or the Stones in a potential movie, to Kubrick’s film, to Blur’s video for ‘The Universal’ and Lana Del ...”

“... nothing coming out of your mouth, and everybody’s going around: “Hello, how are you, what a nice day” … and you’re dying.’ Someone screams – a woman: someone else, or rather pretty much everyone else, covers their ears. Or as Monroe put it in one of the fragments of her 1951 notebook, ‘Actress must have no mouth.’ Actress must be dumb ...”

“... from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with Thistlewood … they brought the Cato-street affair to maturity, just to answer their purposes for striking terror into the minds of the people on the eve of a ...”

“... heart. He learns that you must go beyond the text into history, without expecting to find anything nice at the end of it all. Doctor Criminale’s very topical message is that Europe is a more dangerous place than the innocent English imagine: ‘an ugly twisted growth, hung about with deceits, obscurities and betrayals’. (The blurb informs us that Bradbury ...”

“... to raise money for the Nijinsky Foundation. This time the Times reviewer compared his work to Richard Dadd’s. When a new, unexpurgated version of the diary appeared in 1999 it became clear that Romola had reordered things and edited the journal in ways that subtly changed its overall character, making it less tedious, masturbation-fixated and ...”