“... My head is resting on the curve of the sofa’s arm and one hand lies close to my face. I radiate peace. Over the years, Lucian and I had grown close. He had lost his fear of intimacy with me. The painting, I think, is an image of love. It took two years to finish. During that time, I got pregnant and gave birth to our son, Frank Paul. After the birth, a ...”

“... And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the ...”

“... In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before ...”

“... have their basis, after all, in a rich and resonant cultural background. ‘Suli-man-Son-of-David (upon Whom be Peace)’ is a recurring invocation – and for what reason, precisely, has he been naturalised among the Afghans? A reference to ‘Iskander the Great’ is easily decoded by those who know their Kipling ...”

“... email exchange with one of his advisers on the never-ending challenge of trying to nail down the peace in Northern Ireland. He also feels he has to respond to an email from Joanna Lumley, badgering him about rights of residence for Gurkhas living in the UK. Back in London he takes calls from foreign leaders about the continuing fallout from the financial ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... by setting about it with the enthusiasm of crusaders clearing the infidel from Jerusalem. David Herlihy of Harvard derided it as ‘a silly book, founded on faulty method and propounding a preposterous thesis’, while Lawrence Stone thought it advanced ‘an implausible hypothesis based on a far-fetched connection with one still uproven fact of ...”

“... which became improperly critical and in 1918 was bought over by Lloyd George henchmen. By 1918, as peace returned, the press and the way politicians looked on it had changed profoundly. The proprietors were seen as ‘press lords’, robber barons who might at any time raid the palaces of power, intriguers without responsibility. In 1918, Northcliffe informed ...”

“... out of line. Enter Muhammad Ali, who over the next few years was to change the face of boxing. David Remnick’s book in fact concentrates on the two astonishing fights Ali had with Liston (Ali won the title in the first and defended it successfully in the second), and on the relationship between Ali, Liston and Patterson. For Remnick, as for most ...”

“... French’s Bleeding Heart, Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward and Rates of Exchange, and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being ...”

“... and populares, has not used his life of Pompey to carry the process further. No one could accuse David Stockton’s The Gracchi of a similar failure to discuss evidence and problems. It begins by setting out the basic workings of the Republican constitution, and continues with a (rather brief) examination of the literary sources. There follows a sober survey ...”

“... distressed and defective character. He is not yet, he writes at the age of 41, ‘sufficiently at peace with himself’. Tersely but unequivocally, the book conveys that his character was formed by bereavement. His main bereavement was the loss of his father, who was captured by the Japanese during the war, and killed in an air crash while being ...”

“... the Cabinet that made the deal, and appears, indeed, to have been the first to apply the phrase ‘peace with honour’ to the occasion, may have been the determining factor. Again, Hogg recognised that Churchill had gone too far with his infamous 1945 campaign speech claiming that Labour in power would require a Gestapo, but still he insisted that this ...”

“... is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people dispute the details, the names and the numbers, they ...”