“... portraits, paintings by Van Gogh and Magritte, and a few more difficult works, such as James Ensor’s Mariage des masques.Paintings that documented the West’s preoccupation with the East were a productive theme: Matisse’s mysterious Persian Woman; Gauguin’s Still Life with Japanese Print; a photograph of Edward Lane in Persian ...”

“... to mid-century American pulp fiction. In his introduction to Manchette’s The Mad and the Bad, James Sallis quotes Chandler on the ‘realist in murder’, whowrites of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in ...”

“... fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am no woman. Keep your tires to yourself. Nor am I Pericles Prince of Tyre.’ Indeed, one way to suggest a noisy crowd circa 1609 was to invoke an audience for Pericles: describing a packed ...”

“... friends, his only link with the world of people who care for him.Harry’s dead parents, Lily and James, were not ordinary humans but a powerful witch and wizard. The Dursleys seldom speak about them, and when they do it’s always with contempt, but as Harry grows up he begins to learn about them and to learn that he, too, is a wizard, though he is not ...”

“... woods. Many people in Dewsbury think the media overdid it. ‘The press wanted to make it another James Bulger,’ a police officer tells me. The CPS reduced the charge from attempted murder to assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, which is what the girl was found guilty of. Still, it was horrible, and not a surprise, to watch the TV graphics on ...”

“... he is all of the showbusiness spectacles we have ever known rolled into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the ...”

“... and in another language; many émigrés or refugees or transplanted folk (‘homeloose’ in James Wood’s coinage) end up with a rusty, old-fashioned command of their language of origin and an imperfect mastery of the newly acquired tongue. There are a few exceptions, but it is more usual to have one language for the library and another for the bedroom ...”

“... hollow and empty as the space between stars’, or Ellroy’s benzedrine-driven hyper-kinetics, or James M. Cain’s rat-a-tat ‘let’s get stinko’ hard-boiled self-consciousness. Flatness is Willeford’s style; metaphor is mistrusted, so is interiority, both the author’s and the characters’. At the end of The Way We Die Now, the last Moseley book and ...”

“... Peter von Cornelius. Hugely popular exhibitions of potential schemes were held in Westminster Hall and much discussed, for the public expected a lot for their money. The scheme was supposed to encourage artists, educate visitors, stimulate the members of the Lords and Commons, and tell the national story from its misty Arthurian origins to the field of ...”

“... died in Sydney when Michael was 14. On the boat home Margaret met a rich middle-aged entrepreneur, James Patrick Anderson, known as Andy, who effectively became Michael’s father, paying for holidays abroad and a private education at Clifton College in Bristol, though according to Spoto they remained ‘strangers’ to each other. Before he went to boarding ...”

“... as professor of creative writing at Glasgow University, a position shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman; and nice gigs as a celebrity designer of murals at Hillhead subway station and at the Oran Mór arts centre. In terms of politics, however, Gray and the new Glasgow are at loggerheads. In 1990 he lampooned the European City of Culture festivities in ...”

“... backed into, influenced by the huge crowds that gathered to view the body in the Kremlin’s Hall of Columns and kept coming after the customary three days’ viewing, as well as by Professors Zbarsky and Vorobev’s eagerness to try out their new chemical procedures for long-term preservation. At first the mausoleum on Red Square to which Lenin’s body ...”

“... exchanged with the gentlemen. After that a riot broke out, the guards had to be called from St James’s to restore order and the night ended with a £100 bill for damages and a great deal of heated comment in the papers. According to one of the supper party, Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex, who sent an excited account of the events to his friend ...”

“... what he had learned from memory when he returned to his large draughty residence at Madingley Hall. The same year, Albert opened a dossier entitled ‘Bertie’s Marriage Prospects’. Princess Alexandra was the lead candidate from the start: she was pretty and had been ‘very strictly kept’ according to Vicky, who noted approvingly that she had not ...”

“... My role involved sitting on a set of steps to one side of the stage in Silchester village hall, and reading out, from a primitive autocue – a series of large sheets of white cardboard, the text handwritten on them in thick felt-tip pen – the story of the first Christmas, as my contemporaries performed what I spoke. The most thrilling scene for me ...”