“... It is perhaps significant that when her daughter showed the manuscript of these memoirs to Richard Buckle, who was preparing the Penguin edition of his life of Nijinsky, he did not think it necessary to change his own evaluation. But he was fascinated by Nijinska’s memories of her brother’s hitherto unrecorded early childhood. One sees why: they ...”

“... and falls – splat! – to his backside on the bathroom floor. Charlie is weeping, banging on the wall with his fist. The policeman is standing, slipping, falling – splat! splat! – over and over again. Charlie turns and stumbles despairingly out of the bathroom, face buried in his sleeve. The falling rhythms catch nicely the comedy of the falling to the ...”

“... glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the in-your-face, out-of-your-skull, trust-nobody, swallow-anything limbo that acted, it has become clear, as a curtain-raiser to the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman ...”

“... position was like that of the scholarship boy, ‘at the friction-point of two cultures’, as Richard Hoggart wrote in The Uses of Literacy. ‘The test of his real education lies in his ability, by about the age of 25, to smile at his father with his whole face and to respect his flighty young sister and his slower brother.’ Storey transposed ...”

“... up. He sees the London smoke is only a footstool. Above, the rain as it leaves mounts in a curving wall, immense, slate grey, slate purple. An anvil, pulling back. At the very top, it cauliflowers. It goes to bumps and lumps and smoothed-out tiny battlements too complicated for your eyes, but all crisp and clear.Even in his first appearance, on the day of the ...”

“... Nonetheless, for many years what he chose to record of reality was pattern: the texture of a wall, the twist of a staircase, the reflection in a puddle. He spoke often about his pursuit of the ‘golden section’ and implied that the best pictures could be judged with a ruler, or at least diagrammatically. The reason his photographs often feel numbly ...”

“... rightness of the British cause and the US press duly fell in with it. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal compared Mossadegh to Hitler, even though his occasionally authoritarian populism had to contend with a fractious parliament, and a growing internal opposition composed of merchants, landowners, royalists, the military and right-wing clerics ...”

“... illumination in the whole set is the faded sign for SUNLIGHT SOAP still surviving on an old brick wall. A little dizzy now, and peckish, I opted for a coffee break in the Dock Café, where I hoped to pick up on local responses to the national day of mourning. This bright, clean facility was certainly an improvement on what had been here before. The starred ...”

“... running his own defence and who died before judgment was given. Armatta dedicates her book to Sir Richard May, an English circuit judge who presided over the trial until just before the end of the prosecution case in February 2004, and died shortly afterwards. Despite this, most of her critical comments are directed at the judges’ failure to reform matters ...”

“... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...”

“... the entire Paternoster. Descartes had a special fondness for clockwork, and possessed a fine wall-clock of his own. He greatly admired the ornate clock at Strasbourg with its automatic crowing cockerel, and when he explored the hypothesis that ‘the body is nothing but a statue or an earthenware machine’ in his early manuscript On Man, his main ...”

“... dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America’, accepted the ‘stipend’ on behalf of ‘Richard Python’. ‘The great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our very eyes, in the Nixon administration,’ Corey announced. He described Gravity’s Rainbow as ‘a small contribution to a certain degree, since there are over three and a half ...”

“... so on.For the most part art-historical terms – Fauvism, Cubism and the rest – are avoided in wall texts in favour of general rubrics like ‘Abstraction and Utopia’ and ‘Design for Modern Life’, and inclusive settings like ‘Paris in the 1920s’ and ‘In and around Harlem’. Sometimes the galleries are punctuated by New York moments: an early ...”

“... of provincial artisan stock. He was born in Exeter around 1547, the eldest of eight children of Richard Hilliard, a goldsmith, and Laurence Wall, the daughter of Richard’s former master (her name recurs in later generations of the family in the more sophisticated form of ...”

“... an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.’ This is an arch piece of marketing from Richard Osman, promoting his detective novels to an American readership. There’s no reason to suppose that British people are better at hiding in plain sight than anyone else. However, they do like a murder story, and a thriving industry has grown up around ...”