“... the end of a hard day’.Pym’s comedies are disenchanted romances. Her spinsters often marry but do so with their eyes open. Men, they realise, are best treated as children – helpless and often peevish. Eligible bachelors and widowers with Victorian names – Aylwin, Everard, Marius – are blithe egotists: Fabian Driver in Jane and Prudence leaves his own ...”

“... cowered in a ‘cold, damp three-star hotel’ in Liverpool, worried that if he went outside he’d be attacked. He had embarked on what he called ‘Operation Scouse-grovel’, after the magazine he edited, the Spectator, published an (unsigned) editorial describing Liverpudlians as having ‘a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche’: ‘They see ...”

“... 2024, London’s annual Mid-Century Modern fair celebrated its 21st anniversary in Christison Hall, a light, airy, wood and concrete ceremonial space in the grounds of Dulwich College. Here you could shop for Panton, Knoll or Eames chairs, World Expo posters or fabrics by Lucienne Day, and leaf through a range of zines, maps and books, while the building ...”

“... his most unspeakable thoughts – ‘unspeakable’ in the sense adopted by his fictional Maurice Hall (‘I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’) – but also his worries and rages (‘Last night, alone, I had a satanic fit of rage against mother for her grumbling and fault-finding, and figured a scene in which I swept the mantelpiece with my arm ...”

“... dramas, and supreme among them was the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in the great hall of Fotheringay Castle. The momentous event, the inevitability of which was conveyed in a way that no history book could rival, unfolded in distinct tableaux, in the third and last of which Mary, who had already faced her accusers and said farewell to her ...”

“... time I see you at the picture show.I guess I’m just another fan of yoursAnd I thought I’d write and tell you so.She then starts to sing the familiar words:You made me love you.I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it.You made me love youAnd all the time you knew it, I ...”

“... She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently. There was a narrow passageway between the wall of crates and her personal pile of stuff: banana boxes, a disused bead curtain, a mop bucket. One of the crates has crept into the study, where the postwoman’s computer rears up out of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the picture sooner; it was crumpled where her great-grandson kept picking it up to look at it.I’d come to the Campbells’ house straight from the new station on the edge of town. The first few streets I cycled through were lined with Union Jacks somebody had lashed halfway up the lamp-posts. As I approached the centre they petered out. Deirdre didn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”