“... neophytes – just knows the types so well: English insouciance, le chic français. The entrance hall is created from columns of illuminated Vogue covers arranged by colour (a bit gauche, non?) and leads into a film gallery, where clips of models dancing and cavorting, pulling faces and rolling their eyes, transfix the incoming crowd. All the footage is ...”

“... the powers of her own imagination) responded to this medical miracle by asking, ‘How do you know I didn’t invent Mr Lake?’ The consequent scandal, combined with Riding’s hospital expenses, led Graves in 1929 to write Goodbye to All That as a money-spinner, and indeed to say goodbye to all that by emigrating to Mallorca, where he remained ...”

“... on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and ...”

“... Wood morphing into Bill Wyman. A heavy silver wedding ring. The ever-present mobile phone. I’d given Mr Nice a first reading. And that’s how Marks presented himself. How he charmed the uncharmable, the warders at Terre Haute Penitentiary: his ‘usual trick of being excessively friendly and polite’. He radiates one-to-one openness, offers an unending ...”

“... for his own psychic traumas. In this reading Delany is following Brandt’s earlier critics, David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey, who identified in Brandt’s photographs coded expressions of his disturbed psyche. They contain what Delany identifies as ‘symbols and obsessions peculiar to himself’.Ever since Brandt became the focus of academic study in the ...”

“... he first saw the likes of Trellick Tower. This wasn’t ‘his’ architecture, it had nothing to do with where he was from. Calder wants to make an argument about the greatness of Brutalism as an architectural style. His selection of buildings is eclectic and personal, and avowedly unpolitical.* There’s Hermit’s Castle in Achmelvich, a ...”

“... books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the grander squares in Leeds, where the posh doctors and surgeons from the Brotherton Wing had their consulting-rooms. Nowadays the ring road makes the square difficult to get to and it’s in a bad ...”

“... IRA. We have planted bombs at the southern entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel. For goodness sake, do something about it. We want the area cleared.”’ So Gareth Parry reported in the Guardian of 19 January 1979. Bomb-carriers, from The Secret Agent to Paul Theroux’s Deptford-based urban terrorists in The Family Arsenal, have delighted in targeting ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... on the catwalks of Milan? What happens when it goes wrong? Did Diana overdo it on Panorama? Why do Melania and Ivanka, on a trip to the Vatican, look more Gothic than Catholic? And at what point do we draw the line between dress and costume, between life and art? Edith Sitwell was made to feel self-conscious about her ...”

“... of the people in the wake of 1968. Benn’s foundational insight was that ‘more people want to do more for themselves, and believe they are capable of doing so, if the conditions could only be created that would make this possible.’ Benn demanded that the concerns of feminists, Black activists and others organising for themselves be absorbed into the ...”

“... how she voted), or anything practical. No exchange of recipes. No mention of sport. ‘Anita, what do you think of Ireland’s chances in the Six Nations?’ was not a question that ever came to my lips. I remember her telling me that she had just finished a novel and so, for the moment, was ‘doing exactly what I like’. I said, teasingly: ‘Well, in your ...”

“... out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the ...”

“... Morris and a great deal of cold water ... he says it is useless, that I am going to do a thing with no basis to do it on ... “Look I am going to forge a weapon for you; and thus I too work with you in the overthrow of Society.” To which he replied: “The weapon is too small to be of any ...”

“... before Wimbledon and other prized parts of the output go the way of the Premier League and Sir David Attenborough onto better financed channels. That’s not the only difficulty. It is generally reckoned that if the BBC is to justify being the beneficiary of a poll tax, the BBC needs to reach at least 90 per cent of the UK audience, although there is a bit ...”