“... the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end ...”

“... Instead, the Democrats pulled off the strongest midterm showing by a party occupying the White House in two decades. While they lost the House, the Republican majority is wafer-thin. Most of the candidates backed by Trump lost – including, crucially, the election-denying secretary of state candidates. And the Democrats held on to their majority in ...”

“... By the same token, Britishness of the Ulster kind – Orange parades and kerbsides painted red, white and blue – seems demonstrative and stridently un-British. To the summer visitor from Britain who pulls off the ferry at Larne, the proliferation of Union Jacks along roads and at roundabouts is alienating. Unintentionally perhaps, the puffed-up ...”

“... and consultancies, or the media circuit might beckon. Such soft landings aren’t available to Peter Mandelson, whose long-deserved fall is finally absolute. Mandelson was fired as ambassador to the United States in September, after the release of an initial tranche of files relating to the sex criminal and financier Jeffrey Epstein. These files ...”

“... One may ask of Ms Ford’s book, rather as Alice asks of the White Knight’s poem: ‘What is it called?’ The title on the jacket is ‘Men’; the title on the title-page is Men. The jacket is the part of a book where publishers most candidly make known their views. Publishing contracts specifically reserve to the publisher the right to determine its appearance, unilaterally if necessary ...”

“... exits from another. His failure to spot Cairo will very nearly prove fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice him. Spade has failed to understand that a corridor is less a space than a channel of communication through which people, things and messages pass in both ...”

“... than Lancashire people, and it gets me down. Six thefts from the unit in the time we are here. Peter the caterer parks his van every night on St George’s Plateau, a well-lit spacious place in the centre of the city. Every night someone tries to break in. At breakfast in the hotel I ask for some brown toast. The waiter, a boy of 16 and as thin as a ...”

“... hand, the crucial element of his art, his treatment of colour, cannot be reproduced in black-and-white illustrations; and, perhaps worse, even the best and technically most advanced colour plates necessarily distort and impoverish the rich harmonics of his colour schemes. On the other hand, the sheer splendour, liveliness and immediacy of Titian’s ...”

“... times life size, a tiny rosebud, its fragility compounded by its position off centre in a wide, white space. There are none of the trompe l’oeil shadows often used by traditional flower painters, and images shift in their relation to the frame, often asymmetrically placed, unusually angled or seeming to extend beyond the picture. Tulip (Red and ...”

“... but named after a real one. His uncle is the American millionaire Pierpont Morgan, who owns the White Star Line, which in turn owns the Titanic. Morgan is an orphan. His father died before he was born, his mother three years after. She was a French girl, name unknown, who worked in a café and once sat for Cézanne. His father’s exact identity is not ...”

“... to say that these three are ‘well-known anthropologists’ is a bit like saying that Vanna White is a well-known lexicographer. To be fair, each of them did something that was a genuine contribution to anthropology, but the rest was docudrama and self-promotion. The discipline seems particularly vulnerable to this form of exhibitionist exuberance, and ...”

“... of a bear dejectedly pulling a pram. Or the amateur artists of Hiroshima. Or the carvings of white wooden birds, with wings and fan tails, about six inches long, made from well-soaked pine-wood and hung in the kitchen of a peasant home, in Czechoslovakia, in the Baltic lands, or in Berger’s own Haute-Savoie. This is the Berger I admire most, a man who ...”

“... Paisley – who helped maintain the minority Labour government in power was fair game. Thanks to Peter Wright’s revelations we are more or less familiar with what went on in this period, though it is important to say that Wallace was the first to make public admission of these campaigns, well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward ...”

“... over, he says no. There is a fabled long version of Apocalypse Now – almost six hours – which Peter Cowie reports on in his lively and compendious The Apocalypse Now Book, from which I have taken many of the quotations in this piece, although I also learned a lot from Eleanor Coppola’s Notes (1979), and from Fax Bahr’s documentary Hearts of Darkness ...”

“... and concluding that it could go either way. Formally, too, he errs on the side of prudence. Unlike Peter Ackroyd, Holroyd doesn’t insert fictional passages; nor does he emulate Edmund Morris’s insertion of himself – as a schoolboy – into a life of Ronald Reagan. But he’s there nonetheless. It’s been possible to detect Holroyd’s presence in his ...”