“... because the would-be biographer has just shot – presumably dead – the artist-narrator. Philip Larkin has similarly written a (fairly) friendly hate-poem to his future biographer, although himself so warmly opposed to what he sees as the inhumanity and self-conceit of Modernism as to make some critics read him as if his work were hardly art at ...”

“... Cheney conceded, ‘but the most plentiful source of affordable energy in the country.’ Philip Clapp, president of the US National Environmental Trust, denounced Cheney’s plan as ‘an across-the-board attack on the environment’. Europeans began calling Bush the ‘Toxic Texan’. Scientists have all but unanimously condemned the new US ...”

“... much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of course, had ...”

“... of Jesse Owens, the grim-faced Hitler, the stiff-armed salutes of the Austrian, Italian and French contingents. The map montage in which the torch crosses Europe, Olympia to Berlin, is like an invasion rehearsal. When Horace Cutler, the Tory leader of the Greater London Council, made the speculative proposal, in 1979, that the 1988 Olympics should be ...”

“... a major industry if it could help it. The state bookmaker (the Tote, which operated on the French system of pooling bets) was forced to compete for custom with privately owned rivals, which could offer more tempting fixed odds. But the British government wasn’t about to let those private firms flaunt what they were up to. This was to be a commercial ...”

“... hear its beating, thum-thump-thum-thump’.At Yaddo writers’ retreat, Frame at first avoided Philip Roth. Once they became friends, they took to writing each other provocative notes. (‘Dear Mrs Breast, It has come to my attention that you have not only failed to pay your rent on the nest we have provided for you, but that you sit down there all day ...”

“... only person there; today it’s crowded out, a large proportion of the visitors for some reason French, including two droll-looking, dikey, long-nosed ladies who might have run a bar or spirited away fallen flyers during the war. Few seats, or seats that can be sat on, so I end up in the picture gallery, where there are a couple of benches – and a couple ...”

“... other pinky figures and a bow-fronted display cabinet containing porcelain and ivory figurines. French windows led to a terrace with steps down to a garden which had a long lawn and a large greenhouse.Upstairs there were five rooms. A large bow-windowed bedroom at the front with a huge feather-bed belonged to my maternal grandparents. Next to it was the ...”

“... But what can you say about your own life to someone on the brink of theirs? I didn’t cry when Philip died either. I’d seen him shrivel into a brown husk, the taut dry skin stretched over his skeleton like a mummified body excavated from some desert tomb. I’d seen him in his wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped to his face, his eyes rotating ...”

“... the three bus companies supposedly competing in Lelystad, he said, are all owned by the same French firm. ‘Today’s Wednesday, yeah?’ he said. ‘On Wednesday, we have at least six people coming to the door, all bringing some mail. First was the local paper. Then the other local paper. Then the postman comes. Three more will come later. I think ...”

“... the second biggest UK bank after HSBC. Fred Goodwin was something of a hero in the banking world. Philip Delves Broughton, a former Telegraph journalist who went to Harvard to do an MBA and wrote a funny, depressing book about it, What They Teach You at Harvard Business School, reports that in 2003 the school made RBS the subject of one of its famous case ...”

“... Russian rabbinate had historically supported the anti-semitic Tsar against Bonaparte, viewing the French as bearers of secularism and enlightenment. The other is that he saw, in the attachment of many Jewish intellectuals to Marxism, a sort of displaced messianic impulse. This certainly aided his persistent misreading of Marx and of what he thought of as ...”