“... and his first portrait of the author ‘was described by the critics as like that of a drowned man, taken out of the water’. Sickert’s portrait was likened to ‘an intoxicated mummy, a boorish goat’. Moore, entering into the spirit of the game, said Jacques-Emile Blanche made him look like a drunken cabby. Additional insults are to be gleaned from ...”

“... use of Maeterlinck’s L’lntelligence des fleurs in describing the first, charmingly camp pas de deux between the Baron de Charlus and his newest heart-throb, Jupien. In biology, a tropism is the instinctive movement that occurs when an organism responds to an outside stimulus: the often microscopic reorientation by ...”

“... with her own self, or non-self, as a male dream preserve, the woman’s refuge might be, as St Paul said, in silence. And, ironically, it is the most ‘sensitive’ males who could be, in this context, the most exasperating. Feminism is surely right to be particularly resentful of male attempts to create, in however full a degree of sympathy, the ...”

“... was a live one, working hard, after paying its respects, to defuse the purple excesses of Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. This is P.D. James at her best; the fastidious dabbling in horror, the forensic eye finding order in chaos. Now, 22 years later, with the oven-ready blockbuster, Original Sin, she returns to cover the ...”

“... the story, which will be deeply felt by all those who knew this gentle, reflective and withdrawn man. It was, of course, inevitable that popular newspapers should have sought to add scandal to sensation as soon as the news was known. It was claimed that when he summoned the doctor of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (where he lived) on the morning of Sunday, 16 ...”

“... recollecting the day that Picasso took him, as a favoured confidant, to his vaults in the Banque de France. The fortune Zervos was allowed to glimpse in the mid-1930s had ridden out the Wall Street crash, and had been accumulating since before the First World War. The epithet ‘triumphant’ in the title of the new volume of John Richardson’s magnum opus ...”

“... circumscribed by the simultaneous eclipse of the British Empire and of the idea of the leisured man of letters. Nor are matters helped by such vulgar difficulties as the need to pay tradesmen, the need to keep up an appearance of sexual continence and the need to maintain a steady flow of copy. In the Raven world, yin and yang consist of a permanent ...”

“... to another, contrary process and that Africa’s peoples are retaking possession of themselves. Paul Richards is a veteran British anthropologist whose special interest is the rainforest peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia: groups which have spent most of the Nineties in apparently fruitless pestering or killing of themselves and their neighbours. Richards ...”

“... from ancient hunters and herdsmen. Following domestication, write James Serpell and Elizabeth Paul, religious and secular ideologies reinforced ‘hierarchical notions of human separateness and superiority’, and the idea of animals as somehow equal with humans gave way to the world described in the Book of Genesis. Evolutionists and creationists may ...”

“... may well continue as president for life: he’s only 57, a ‘small boy’ compared to 65-year-old Paul Kagame of Rwanda (23 years in office), 79-year-old Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo (26 years in office), 81-year-old Teodor0 Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea (44 years in office) and 90-year-old ...”

“... and Scottish father in Eastbourne in May 1940 and raised in Balham in South London. She married Paul Carter in 1960 when she was just twenty, then moved with her husband to Bristol, where she wrote four novels in quick succession and started publishing her journalism in New Society magazine. Her third novel won a travel award of £500, which Carter used to ...”

“... he died in 1991 he could have run through all the major platform games – Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros – and if he’d just taken a little better care of himself, and hung onto life a couple more years, his fingers might have twitched the course of Doomguy through the military base on Phobos, and manipulated him into killing the demons from ...”

“... belief and devastating disillusion, because he had grown up in a family with a resident guru, one Paul Brunton or P.B. Masson’s tantalising remarks about this unusual upbringing have been fleshed out in My Father’s Guru, and it’s a dilly. There have been memoirs before about growing up in a narrow sect – one thinks of Edmund Gosse and the Plymouth ...”

“... so unyielding to Morris’s probings. In principle at least, his desire to find out what sort of man Reagan was seems entirely reasonable. Of all American Presidents, the foolish-seeming and yet abominably successful Reagan surely presents the most tempting subject for character analysis. If Morris had come back armed with any insight into what lurked ...”

“... in Seven Days’ and so on. After getting out of jail, Moat got a gun and a haircut ‘like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver’, and he repeatedly called Sam, who had broken up with him when he was inside; she rejected him. On the night of Friday, 2 July, he was driven to Birtley, where Sam lived, by his friend Karl Ness. He tracked Sam and her boyfriend down to ...”