“... collected by Saatchi), on established Turner-winning Brits like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, on old bugbears like Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Shortly before Fuller’s death, he thought the tide was turning: Serota seemed to be coming into line, even Saatchi was investing in the School of London. Then it turned right back. In his last completed ...”

“... The Blitz had left bombsites that were thickest around the docks. The cenotaph in front of St George’s Hall told us what had happened to the men who enlisted there. Surrounded by Murphys and Rooneys you could hardly forget the Great Famine that pushed waves of Irish immigrants into Liverpool cellars and court housing. Before the Second World War, thirty ...”

“... recur throughout A la recherche), engages the nature of his prose as well as his sentiments; as Walter Benjamin said, in one of the finest essays ever written on the novel, Proust’s language is inseparable from his ‘intransigent French spirit’. It is a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through ...”

“... billed as ‘the laugh sensation of two continents’ at the Coconut Grove in Miami: the columnist Walter Winchell called it ‘vulgar’ and Bert Lahr, who played Estragon, got a letter asking what a star of The Wizard of Oz was doing ‘in a play which is communistic, atheistic and existential’. ‘This Miami fiasco does not distress me in the smallest ...”

“... time to time this makes people think in the wrong tense: ‘“What was all this, anyway,” mused Walter grimly, “but the physical evidence of all the more fundamental changes that had taken place in Singapore in the last two decades?”’ On occasion quotation marks appear at random in passages of free indirect style: ‘He began to think about other ...”

“... nuclear reactor, are essays about 19th-century women novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. The tribute paid to Austen, in particular, is remarkable both for its warmth and for its acuity. Woolf admired Austen above all for her ability to grasp the exceptional moment – ‘in which all the happiness of life is collected’ – as it ...”

“... he has heard he will be viciously satirised. (If the film is remembered at all, it is as a minor George Cukor film and for the off-screen love affair between Montand and Monroe). Mistaken for an actor, he ends up playing himself onstage, which allows her character to tell him to his face what she thinks of the billionaire who he in fact is: ‘Nothing but a ...”

“... she or Constance objected to the book. Constance proudly pointed out to her a good review of it by Walter Pater. Despite his other liaisons and their many separations, Oscar and Constance continued to move around London together quite happily. He wrote her devoted letters when he was away and maintained good relations with Lady Mount-Temple. In Constance’s ...”

“... and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s protest: ‘if all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry ...”

“... other, grandly plotted fictions embedded in the kind of wide historical novelscapes constructed by Walter Scott and Stendhal. Neither project was tremendously successful; there is nothing in the collection to disturb the conventional wisdom that Pushkin was a poet of genius who also wrote good prose. If Tales of Belkin gleam with possibility and the beginnings ...”

“... simplicity and euphony’ after growing embarrassed by his youthful attempts to write like Walter Pater. Writing for the theatre also taught him ‘the value of succinctness’: in his novels and stories, he gave up on brocaded descriptions and concentrated on dialogue, narrative development and manipulating the reader’s expectations. But his ...”

“... was suspicious, but the Huxleys pulled more strings until the marriage was allowed to happen. Walter Bedford thereafter ‘melted back into his existence’ and seems never to have been heard of again.As a child, Bedford spent a lot of time on long train journeys, ‘bundled to and fro’ (a phrase from A Legacy) between Berlin, Baden and sometimes ...”

“... on the highway, something had to happen.’ After hurried consultations with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and legal checks to ascertain her constitutional right to act, she announced that Germany’s ‘fundamental right to asylum’ had ‘no upper limit’ and urged her fellow Germans to welcome the needy of the 21st century. ‘We will manage ...”

“... impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost ...”

“... great bugbear), but I agree that Dewey kept Emersonian romance alive in a period when people like Walter Lippmann, and lots of technocratic New Deal bureaucrats, were pooh-poohing it in the name of ‘practical politics’. Westbrook makes a good case for saying that Dewey was ‘a liberal steadily radicalised by his distinctive faith in thoroughgoing ...”