“... unconsciously, as it seems, Frank’s detailed study begins to present that sort of picture, as do Dostoevsky’s own letters, a selection of which has been edited by David Goldstein and Frank. The editing is superb, the notes meticulous, but it must be said that Dostoevsky does not come into the category of great ...”

“... has a long nave with plentiful seating and many smaller circumjacent chapels. In the next decade, David Riesman and Gerald Grant continued in the same vein but added: ‘Occasionally a visionary from one of the side altars will seize the main pulpit ... to lecture the vulgar utilitarians and then march off to found a rival church.’ Among the Luthers they ...”

“... as it was about the British working class and how it had been progressively disempowered and de-emancipated, first by the Conservatives, and then more decisively by New Labour. The Establishment, too, starts from a stereotype (the phrase was first used in its common modern sense by Henry Fairlie in the 1950s to denote the aristos who covered for Burgess ...”

“... in no possible circumstance acquire European territory by war, but it still did not want Russia to do so, and it became a cardinal point of British policy that Turkey should be protected for as long as possible, which plainly made Russia a potential antagonist. Shortly after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... matinée idol good looks. Dietrich was the matron of honour. The audience also knew that she’d been in an implausible number of car accidents with a string of different men; first with the singer Charles Aznavour in July 1951; then again with Aznavour a month later – this time her lover, the cyclist André Pousse, was also in the car. In 1958, she had ...”

“... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you ...”

“... twist at the tip, and he takes it down to turn it over in his hands as he talks; normally he’d smoke through his lunch hour. He’s wearing long jean shorts and a Homer Simpson T-shirt; his eyes are ringed with yellow-blue shadows. ‘To be honest, this place takes so much out of me,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to pull away when I get home. I certainly ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... asked: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Where does it look like I’m going?’ ‘I thought you’d already done everything you had to do.’ He raised his bunched-up underpants and socks. ‘I thought I’d throw these into the hamper.’ ‘You always throw them on the ...”

“... Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d’Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order. In the year the Revolution began, this area was known as the Cordeliers district, taking its name from the monastery of the Cordeliers, the ...”

“... I wondered if I should tell him. He might find it interesting. This would depend on whether he’d had Nicholas Spice in mind when he invented Nicholas Spare, an odious music critic whom the nice characters in An Equal Music loathe. I decided to avoid the subject of Nicholas Spare. Instead we talked about poetry, and then about Vikram Seth and then about ...”

“... It’s the problem of the rich man with a closet full of new shoes. Rich men, as we all know, do not buy a single pair of shoes at a time; they buy ten different models, and in order to distribute them equally throughout five houses in various parts of the world, their hard-pressed valets find themselves staggering out of the shops with something like ...”

“... everything has been said.’ Critics not only rush in where there is nothing to be said, what they do say is glib: ‘Painting is not difficult when you do not know anything about it. But when you know, oh, it’s something quite different.’ Biographers have no easy task. There is plenty of material: notebooks, letters ...”

“... roughly two books a year for the next five decades. When The Outline of History (a brisk tour d’horizon from protozoa to the present) appeared in book form in 1919, it sold two million copies within a few years in Britain and the US alone. A collected edition of The Works of H.G. Wells was published in 24 volumes in 1927 when there were still some forty ...”