“... shaven-headed. Others were swathed in bandages and were disfigured by post-operative bruises and black eyes.The patients were dressed in hospital-issue clothing and had no personal possessions. I wondered where Beegan kept his pictures. Under a mattress? Inside The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson? Or did he carry them on his person at all times? There is no ...”

“... in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a temporary black-out in the growth of the national psyche. Our only republic remains under ban, a historical freak. Rosebery could raise a statue to Cromwell outside Parliament: eighty years later, Benn could not even get him onto a postage-stamp, at a time when Rosa ...”

“... decision – thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered by Stalin and Tito – remain a black and unforgettable chapter. The accusations against Macmillan personally became progressively more pointed in Nikolai Tolstoy’s three polemics: Victims of Yalta (1977), Stalin’s Secret War (1981) and The Minister and the Massacres (1986), which fingered ...”

“... with their faces upward, Lie breathless on the plain … the world stands before me Like a black desert at the approach of night: I’ll lay me down, and stray no further on. Its fourth act is full of echoes, not of the Roman source-play, but of Iago-speech: because Othello, Shakespeare’s most Restoration drama, gives Iago that dangerous dialect ...”

“... of time at the Stud, so much so that the owner, who looked a religious type, with his beard and black fedora, turned up at his funeral, praying like mad in a big voice that drowned out the others. My brother would have a lot of Cutty, one rock at the Stud. And he fed an awful lot of quarters into the pool table. But the owner probably just liked my ...”

“... is sunnier. (This is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers consciously notice. Christopher Sykes once asked his good friend Evelyn Waugh how it was that one of his earlier novels, apparently light and humorous, had an undertow of melancholy. Waugh said he had done it by keeping the weather in the book grey and rainy.) One of my favourites ...”

“... to make the theft secure’. Not that this does him any good: Ungrateful man! But vain thy black design, Th’attempt, and not the deed, thy hand defiled; Preserved by his own charms and spells divine, Safely the gentle Shakespeare slept and smiled. Shakespeare remains untouchable, serenely away with the fairies, an outcome rigged from the start: the ...”

“... had more or less impermeable walls and its contents were more or less homogeneous. Christopher Hann, discussing what he called the ‘Malinowski period’ of early field anthropology, in Social Anthropology (one of the volumes in the Teach Yourself series), underlined the emphasis laid by Malinowski and his disciples and students on the ...”

“... And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth Throughout the fluid mass, but downward purged The black tartareous cold infernal dregs Adverse to life: then founded, then conglobed Like things to like . . . It is not only the foundation of the world that is referred to here, but the foundation of the English Commonwealth out of political chaos. The word ...”

“... shattering. The year after the New Verse special a thinly disguised Auden was the star turn in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Lions and Shadows, the first of many mythologising appearances in the reminiscences of his generation: ‘he struck me as being, so to speak, several sizes larger than life,’ Isherwood wrote of the undergraduate genius, whom he ...”

“... led to an enormous surge in smuggling. By the end of the war, Lee was manufacturing gum for the black market. The rubber estates of the Malayan hinterland meanwhile became a wasteland, as the defeats of the Japanese navy barred shipping to the mainland. When it became clear, on 22 August 1945, that General Itagaki intended to surrender, three hundred ...”

“... table between John Standing, playing Nicholas Jenkins, and Jeremy Clyde, playing Roddie Cutts. Christopher Morahan wants our table to be having an animated and amusing conversation, with Sillery the life and soul of the party. There is one problem with this and that is that the MPs are played by London extras, a notoriously difficult, unco-operative ...”

“... taller than Nikki, but dressed in identical clothes: red Kickers, knee-length white socks, black leggings, a green T-shirt and a purple coat with a pink floral lining. It was placed on a table in front of the jurors. They had already been told that when Nikki entered the Old Exchange Building she was no longer wearing the coat and shoes. They were ...”

“... just before she left her home for ever, a handsome woman of 34 with large sensitive eyes and thick black hair that falls over her earrings. An architect’s design of the house shows that Jad Tawil had added the third storey for his brother George in 1947 because George was planning to marry. Aunty Selma lived on the second floor with Jad and his wife Nada and ...”

“... who make things with their hands’, first at Ditchling Common and then at Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains. He had become engaged to Gill’s daughter Petra, and was now a full-time artist – initially part of the English revival of wood engraving, the first fruits of which (his illustrations for The Book of Jonah and The Chester Play of the ...”