“... strongly reminiscent of that child’s life of Raphael which made such an impression on the young Sartre. Here, for example, is Penrose’s description of Picasso and his father arriving in Barcelona in 1895: ‘The distinguished, middle-aged man, slightly stooping, had a look of disillusionment, a sad resignation, whereas the small heir to his fading ...”

“... could see exhibitions of the work of Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso or Matisse and the work of their young British followers was not the Tate Gallery, which was hostile to Post-Impressionist work, certainly not the Royal Academy, and not the Hayward Gallery, which did not exist: it was the three small rooms of the Leicester Galleries which are described by ...”

“... I’ve had it packed for a week now’) as well as her unhappiness. Welles’s own mother died young (or youngish – she was 42), but she wasn’t a victim. Daughter of a prosperous Illinois coal merchant, Beatrice Welles was handsome, dynamic and indefatigably improving, reading her son Shakespeare ‘before he could speak’. At 15, Callow comments, the ...”

“... piety’ (whatever that may be). In 1952 he went all the way to Goa to venerate the body of St Francis Xavier. ‘One brown stump of toe emerging from white wrapping,’ he noted approvingly. ‘Body fully vested, one grey forearm and hand, and grey clay-like skull visible.’ This seems only a step away from the pet cemetery in Forest Lawn, and Waugh’s ...”

“... a political genius is laughable. But that is not to say he didn’t put his finger on something. Young people are sick of being short-changed compared with past generations. Mrs May must fix it. Or next time Britain will buy the Marxists’ fool’s gold – and the Tories will be helpless to prevent the inevitable horrors that will follow.’The Sun ...”

“... do a lot for an ambitious person. It created bonds. One of Logan’s friends, the German Quaker Francis Daniel Pastorius, attracted the attention of the great William Penn when he put a grandiose Latin inscription over the door of his cabin: ‘Parva domus sed amica bonis, procul este prophani’ – ‘It’s a little house but welcoming to good ...”

“... early, so that by 12.45 I’m back home. It’s a model service, today’s radiographer a bearded young man who asks about Allelujah!, and shows me the screen and how he measures the width of my (quite small) aneurysms. Good young medics always cheer me and offer hope, not for my future but for the world in general.19 ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... in this circumstance.’ This perspective has not prevailed; indeed, as recently as 2013, Pope Francis declared Mary Magdalene the Apostolorum Apostola, the apostle of apostles, emphasising her miraculous repentance: ‘Sometimes in our lives, tears are the lenses we need to see Jesus.’The cult of Mary Magdalene began to grow at the end of the sixth ...”

“... into which to put some of those strange phenomena of the Soviet Union’s last years. (He is too young to have seen these events for himself; this book is based on his PhD at Berkeley.) His is one of a number of new stories of perestroika which are now emerging. Most have a grassroots, out-of-Moscow perspective, but Kellner’s has Moscow in it too. His ...”

“... war I felt little sympathy for what I considered an intrusion of the West.’ He gave advice to a young Australian who wrote saying that he could not get down to work: ‘Directly after breakfast you sit down at the table with a blank sheet of paper and a pen and a glass of whiskey. You drink the glass of whiskey and you begin to write anything that comes ...”

“... of this is Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Man I Killed’, a preternaturally lucid description of a young Vietnamese soldier blown up by the narrator’s grenade. O’Brien’s precise, almost entranced detailing of the star-shaped hole where one of the man’s eyes used to be, his torn ear lobe, his scattered sandals, a butterfly alighting on his chin, are ...”

“... posture. In Red Dragon, things naturally go wrong for Will Graham. He does catch the bad guy, one Francis Dolarhyde, who turns out to be the employee of a film-processing company: Graham twigs that he had developed film of both the families he had attacked. (Dolarhyde suffered from a cleft palate as a child; Harris is heroically un-PC about giving his baddies ...”

“... he had the bad luck to run headlong into the terror of the 1919 Bavarian Soviet republic; the young Bolsheviks who threatened and appalled him were for the most part Jews. He never entirely recovered, and from then on nursed a pathological hatred of Bolshevism – which he identified with Jews. To understand how important that experience was, one must ...”

“... was an act of love to be presented. Her writing has none of that endearing and secret vanity which Francis Kilvert’s diary was to have, and in which the reader can now share. The ‘quarrel with himself’ was for Wordsworth the simultaneous assertion of his private vision and of his human heart and principles. When he writes of ‘the soothing thoughts that ...”