“... tanneries along the slum route through the inner southern suburbs. We exploit royal visits, and do the same with our dubious anniversaries. The bicentenary, a brontosaurean occasion if ever there was one, is providing much that we could have done without, including a barrage of royal visits. But there are some welcome parks and roadworks, and with these ...”

“... it that none of them come by? Sometimes you think of leaving flowers in the passage. But you never do it, or let us say, you have never done it yet.To write about Robespierre you have to find the courage to allow yourself to be mistaken. Otherwise every sentence will be freighted with conditionals and qualifiers, and every quotation prefaced by ‘alleged to ...”

“... Juárez unfurls, a vast rectangular grid of sparkling lights. The bridge leads to the Avenida de las Américas, an ordinary avenue with streams of cars, shopping centres, petrol stations; it could still be El Paso if it weren’t for the multicoloured buses, the camiones, and the omnipresent stench from the sewers. In the new city centre, groups of ...”

“... know what fun it is.”’ Finding his father out was something Arthur spent a lifetime failing to do. The dream he recorded in his diary in 1916 at the age of 53 is poignant because it made a travesty of his most deep-seated anxieties, as if in that moment – but only in that moment – it could neutralise their sting. It’s nice to think of your father ...”

“... time. If they were at Gurs they were released soon afterwards, making their way back to the Côte d’Azur under a cloud. Grunwald was elderly, frail and monstrous; wherever these weeks were spent, outside of Nice, he seems to have pressed his granddaughter to share his bed. Not long afterwards, Salomon embarked on her life’s work: 769 gouaches on ...”

“... question over whether he’ll even be able to meet us, but apparently the way to get the pope to do something is to tell him not to do it, or vice versa. Jason is very much the same. He is perhaps the person, alone on earth, who would be unaffected by a papal audience. ‘Yeah,’ he says reflectively, ‘if I were ...”

“... educated, and they say – in the century whose art is dominated by such images as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Duchump’s Large Glass, by Beckmann’s visions of hell – that art is about pleasure. The point is that these people are chosen not in spite of their militant complacency but because of it. The staff of the BBC are vetted by MI5 and Radio 3 has ...”

“... was a live one, working hard, after paying its respects, to defuse the purple excesses of Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. This is P.D. James at her best; the fastidious dabbling in horror, the forensic eye finding order in chaos. Now, 22 years later, with the oven-ready blockbuster, Original Sin, she returns to cover the ...”

“... up from there being so much travel: Last thing, after the doors, the windows and the light in the hall, I come up and for the fear the cat might stifle the baby I put the suitcase across the stairs. We are walled in by dreams of travel ... And the modesty of his enterprise, its accuracy, gives it a reticent charm beside the self-observant adventures of ...”

“... least signalising most of these gaps. But his footnotes are sketchy and often vague, his prelims do not extend beyond antiquarian jottings entitled ‘Particulars of the Life of Samuel Pepys’, and he does not bother about such matters as cross-references or literary allusions. In general, he does not gloss obsolete phrases or special usages: he simply ...”

“... upon a time a bird was ill, and a cat, bending down to it, said, “How are you and what do you want? I will give you everything, only get well.” And the bird replied, “If you go away I shan’t die.”’ ‘Is this the nonsense man?’ John Ruskin asked, after receiving a letter from Lear that detailed his latest ventures in painting. He ...”

“... song because it never says she’s black. Everybody knows she’s black and it has nothing to do with knowing the newspaper story. You just know that she must have been black. But then you know that Zanzinger is white, though it never says this either. It’s a terrible thing that you know this from the story, and from the perfunctory prison ...”

“... George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to replace all other taxes, as do some ...”

“... he was 12, Redgrove suffered from ‘what he called “robot obsessional automatisms”, mainly to do with washing’. In his teens Redgrove began to associate mud with eroticism. His poetry returns again and again to moments connected with the sort of experience detailed in his unpublished memoir ‘Innocent Street’, where, using language familiar to ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”