“... spines, nut-brown at the base, rising to a strip of black and changing at the very tip to purest white. When threatened, they roll into an impenetrable ball, which deters almost all animals with the exception of badgers, and us: Pliny wrote that you could unroll them by sprinkling boiling water on their backs, which, unlike his dietary information, does seem ...”

“... When We Were Orphans (reviewed in the LRB, 5 October and 13 April) are quoted at 2-1 and 5-2 with William Hill. And it’s difficult to fancy the four other shortlisted novelists. Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place – the 7-1 outsider and the only first novel on the list – is narrated by Dolores Gauci, a young girl whose Maltese father gambled away his ...”

“... gawping or grinning towards their left, and all perfectly in focus. ‘Big Face in Crowd’ by William Klein (1955). William Klein’s Big Face in Crowd is a ravishing instance of a compositional effect, not quite a trick, he used in street photographs of that period. It is partly a result of the wide-angle lenses ...”

“... and there’s a narrow frieze just below the ceiling. The pattern seems to have been inspired by a William Morris design for Swan House in Chelsea. Parr, an artisan decorator for the Cambridge firm F.R. Leach, was among the people who implemented Morris’s designs at Swan House and elsewhere. He also brought them home. F.R. Leach specialised in a process ...”

“... says: ‘How do you do?’ He replies: ‘Well, that’s a big question.’ Asked if he knew William Randolph Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, he says yes – ‘if anyone did’. When Houseman worries about being fired, Mank says, ‘I’ve never not been fired,’ as if confirming an earlier remark that ‘every moment of my life is ...”

“... number of fancy cars they have. Others are worried that progress will make them less Indian, more white. This isn’t quite what happens, and we should note, at this point, that three out of the four men mentioned above are Caucasian and the fourth is a Native American.The film’s storyline begins when the second of the quarrelling men, Ernest ...”

“... Logic’s necessity is more profound. It’s impossible for a contradiction like ‘Snow is white and snow is not white’ to be true, and this necessity seems absolute. ‘Laws of logic’ don’t function like laws of nature, keeping reality in line, since if they did we could ask why those laws could not be ...”

“... Their importance may rather be that they make it hard to distinguish between the two Empsons, the white-coated technocrat and the plain man costumed in tweedy prejudices. They suggest that, far from shelving his prejudices when he turned to literature, Empson used those prejudices to colour his arguments. Empson felt that history had made him an old ...”

“... the heroine, is in. She does not talk much and she feels like a fantasy figure. Only the scenes in white-ruled South Africa are presented naturalistically. The lusus naturae of the title seems to be Hillela, not apartheid. For one-third of the book, Hillela is living in South Africa or at boarding-school in Rhodesia, under the care of her two aunts, for her ...”

“... for which she served as model.A trio of early still lifes are apparently influenced by William Nicholson, who taught Hamnett at the London School of Art, though her paintings have none of his opulence and clarity. Rather, they are tightly cropped compositions in which objects and forms are flattened and simplified. Planes shift and tilt in ...”

“... work with the more personal and experimental genre of the fancy picture.In a letter to his friend William Jackson, written at the height of his career, Gainsborough complained that he was ‘sick of portraits’, but he seems, nonetheless, to have valued his fancy pictures – these were the works for which he charged the highest prices. And unlike portraits ...”

“... exhibitions, even a big-budget film, Amazing Grace, that made an unlikely matinee idol of William Wilberforce. All these events took place in an atmosphere suffused with self-congratulation. The crusade against the trade and the government’s eventual response offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character: a ...”

“... feelings of hope and opportunity for Sansom, feelings which he associates with his baby. He quotes William Trevor – ‘The map of Ireland is not unlike a sleeping infant’ – as he compares his newborn’s tidy proportions with the ‘faltering outline’ of his own body: ‘I am coming to resemble the shape of mainland Britain.’ But there are other ...”

“... was wearing what he thought of as her Jean Seberg outfit: black pedal-pushers, black and white striped matelot top, a short red silk scarf knotted at her throat.’ ‘Louise was wearing knee-high black leather boots and a tweed cape over a heavy Arran sweater.’ ‘She was wearing a little green coat tightly belted at the waist and her spun-sugar ...”

“... lived with her as his wife. By the time Lady Gregory told James these stories, her husband, Sir William Gregory, had been dead two years. Six weeks before his death, their friend, the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, whom the Gregorys had first met in Egypt in 1881, a year after their marriage, published in a new volume of poetry a group of what he called ‘A ...”