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“... keep the conversation light and flatter the host. Xenophon introduces us to one such character, Philip, in his Symposium, a work of historical fiction written in c.365 BC. Philip stands on the threshold and announces that he is a laughter-maker (gelotopoios) and jokes that he came uninvited because he thought it was more ...”

“... You saw the deaf man concentrate, pouring the beer down the inside of the slightly tipped glass, then he took a long sip and you saw his poorly shaved neck jumping as he swallowed, swallowed. You focused on the constellations of minute bubbles slipping back down the inside of the cold glass that was wet with ...”

“... of Jewish mothering of an intensity rarely seen outside the early works of Woody Allen or Philip Roth. A la recherche has been characterised as a semi-autobiographical novel written by a Jewish homosexual, and narrated by a Gentile heterosexual with an inordinate interest in Jewishness and homosexuality. There is some truth in this, although Proust ...”

“... his best in a messy middle-of-the-road muddle’. This from Wilson’s official biographer, Philip Ziegler. Wilson had one or two good jokes, unlike Callaghan or poor Attlee, so often the butt of other people’s. Tony Blair is not much given to joking. The three memorable gags of his career have come as it nears its end. It’s interesting, in a person ...”

“... countrymen to risk in foreign lands.’ Certainly, the Sussex coast on a hot day, seen through the glass wall of the spiral staircase, the pavilion’s brilliant, confidently conceived identifying feature, seemed infinitely preferable to any Mediterranean beach. Unpopular Culture, a touring exhibition selected by Grayson Perry from the Arts Council ...”

“... of the object that Burroughs was aiming at when he shot his wife in the head in Mexico (champagne glass, shot glass, highball glass, wine glass, gin glass, water glass, tin ...”

“... volley of oaths, his tremendous singing drove them as far as the bottom of the yard.’ Philip, a ‘friend’ (he will eventually cuckold Dexter), calls him ‘a character out of a Russian novel, or a Wagner opera. A noble soul’ – but this never quite proves to be the case, the novella being too controlled, too circumspect for such ...”

“... Charlotte said. ‘It doesn’t seem to work very well.’ Along one side of the room was a glass wall with seating behind it: a viewing gallery for students. A fluorescent purple Insect-O-Cutor blinked high on one wall next to a sign: ‘No eating, drinking or smoking.’ We tied on disposable aprons, rolled plastic gauntlets up our sleeves, tucked the ...”

“... Orthodox get-up – black hat and gabardine. In ‘Eli, the Fanatic’, the transformation helps Philip Roth connect up some of the leading themes of his short stories: anxiety, desire, separation, the odd, unsettling consequences of changes that are incomplete. There are risks for the writer who imagines what a devout world is like. Nathan Englander has the ...”

“... their unusual motivation and their life-long drive to achieve things that do not yet exist. Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh have written an attractive book which reveals the fascination of mathematics as an activity, and the seductions of its claims to indubitability. These have inspired, challenged and confounded views of the world and of the mind ...”

“... of Heaven. He was handsome, butch, gum-chewing and easy-going as Chuck Yeager, the test pilot, in Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983) – by which time his long-term relationship with Jessica Lange had begun on the set of Frances (1982). And he found time to work on screenplays, too, contributing to Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) and, most ...”

“... On 23 April 1977 Philip Larkin came to lunch at Barbara Pym’s cottage in Finstock, near Oxford. She and her sister had only been living there a short while, after Pym’s retirement from her post in Fetter Lane as assistant editor of Africa; and it was Larkin’s first and, as it turned out, his only visit. After her years in the wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS ...”

“... out. He also established a wine museum at Mouton, not the usual mouldering old presses and dusty glass cases full of corks and tasters, but a beautiful pleasure dome filled with works of art connected with wine. During the war he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined ...”

“... of illuminated manuscripts, books of hours marking the rotation of the days and years, and stained glass in which saints hover in cerulean bliss, varied only with an occasional rainbow, a piece of virtuoso craftsmanship, marking the end of the Flood. But this is all still background. Bright blue means day, dark blue night. Nobody perhaps needed more at a time ...”

“... for example, that Vermeer’s girl’s huge pearl earrings are probably fakes, ‘thin spheres of glass’ filled with a preparation made from ‘the silvery scales of a river fish’ – which rather undermines Chevalier’s climactic scene, in which they are sold to a man who bites them to test their authenticity. Inevitably, Bailey often has to take ...”