“... movement, but seeming almost a normal aspect of the modern scene, like the ‘magic realism’ of David Hockney or Alex Colville. James Fenton’s ‘Dead Soldiers’, ‘A German Requiem’ and ‘Children in Exile’ are poems that work by a new and at first disconcerting technique, not to move us or to establish feeling, but to suggest a situation where ...”

“... or to the Immortal’s birthplace. As with all such counsels of wisdom and renunciation, from the Grand Inquisitor down to the various modern secret service agencies, the reasons for this enforced restraint remain mysterious: a Fromm-like ‘escape from freedom’, a preventive brake on permissiveness and the proliferation of Desire? But Grass is a ...”

“... down into sub-Saharan Africa, as far as the northern banks of the Congo: the westerly edge of a grand imperium, already undermined by one world war and destined to crumble under the pressure of another. The passage Azéma favoured was known as the ‘Lister route’. Recoiling from the Phalangist victory, Enrique Lister, one of the Republic’s senior ...”

“... Copts on religious grounds.’ The accusation is that the British – the speech is addressed to David Mountolive, later to be his majesty’s ambassador to Egypt – have never understood any of this, and can’t tell one Arab from another. The person killed at the carnival was mistaken for Justine, and the person whose funeral we witness is Nessim’s ...”

“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... for Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth, whose industrial riches allowed him the Biedermeier carpet, the grand library of partly read books, the cabinet of sophisticated drinks and ‘the oak-framed fireplace with a Mary Cassatt portrait of children above it’.Cassatt lived for sixty years in France and is buried there; she was the second woman to show with the ...”

“... joined the web, you can’t leave.’In a 2008 interview for the Ballet Association, Scarlett told David Bain that he enjoyed his time at White Lodge ‘perhaps more than he should have’. He didn’t elaborate on what he meant by this. Scarlett won all the school’s choreographic prizes, and it was almost certainly this skill that gained him a place in the ...”

“... affairs secretary, and Bernard Ingham, her press officer, and a handful of personal familiars like David Wolfson and Tim Bell, it is hard to think of a single Cabinet politician, perhaps excepting the ever-supplicant Joseph, who did not eventually find themselves, after a period in the sun, banished into the half-light: the most recent victim of this expulsion ...”

“... the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able to return he would certainly have ...”

“... before he had been provoked either by libel or ‘sustained vilification’. It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and social ...”

“... sympathetic to Wagner and sent letters of recommendation on his behalf to the Director of the Grand Opera. Wagner soon discovered how little this really meant: hundreds of such letters were written by the French cultural élite about outsiders, who rarely succeeded in penetrating the charmed circle. By way of reaction, Wagner took as his model those ...”

“... from ‘toppling kings and unseating prime ministers’ as the foremost characteristic of his ‘grand strategy’. This is surely to rate a negative virtue too highly; and in any case to imply that such methods had been much more frequently resorted to in peacetime in the past than had in fact been the case. A more positive version would say that Bevin ...”

“... Sometimes he appears as a decent old buffer, a Victorian paternalist with faithful workers on his grand estate; but sometimes he poses as Mrs Dutt-Pauker, the wealthy Stalinist of Hampstead; then he may become a disturbed police officer struggling to control the fanclubs of Nerdley where all the housewives are violent supporters of different members of the ...”

“... of the cotton dealer’s office and portraits of his Italian relations record his visits to grand-paternal territories. Family matters were kept within the family: strong affection, decorum, financial disaster, and at least one first-class scandal (Degas’s brother was attacked by an angry husband on the steps of the Bourse, and returned blows with ...”

“... from stylistic analysis. There is also the method of ‘too close reading’ wittily practised by David Miller, especially in his book Hidden Hitchcock (2016).Wolfson’s work is not unrelated to this last example – both writers are concerned with seeing apparitions and being glad to see them – but she tends to think that patient, uncensored curiosity ...”