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“... What is​ a ghost?’ Stephen Dedalus asks in Ulysses, and promptly answers his own question. ‘One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.’ Not a figure who is entirely unreal, just one who has become a little faint, lacking in physical immediacy. Perhaps someone who lives in the memory only, not an inconsiderable form of life after all ...”

“... admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with such skill and refinement by an artist destined to be forever unknown and barely identified under the name of Vermeer. All these obligations which have no sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, a world based on ...”

“... her, but my feet were nailed to the ground. Not far from her were other women sitting against the wall or stretched out, their bellies swollen as if they were about to give birth. I couldn’t do anything for these women, many of whom had been very cruel to us. Now they were crushed.   In a corner of the courtyard a man was being beaten to death. His ...”

“... thoughts of a marathon runner whose confident stride devours the first twenty miles, only to hit a wall of pain close to the finishing tape. The best he can do is stagger home nursing his blisters. ‘Unless there is a conscious effort to make a new start, Arabs can look forward only to years of despair, confusion and political stagnation,’ he ...”

“... where Pasternak died. A framed reproduction of his father’s portrait of Tolstoy hangs on the wall; on the bed lies a wilted bouquet of flowers, a reminder of the thousands of mourners who showed up to pay their last respects, lining up for three days on the lanes that ran through the birch woods, even though there had been only the smallest death notice ...”

“... 1993, when Bongo Sr confronted challengers in a presidential contest after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then, the incumbent had won the run-off with 51 per cent of the votes ‘by slightly forcing the hand of destiny’, as Foccart put it. This summer, two months after the death of his father and political role model, Bongo Jr carried the day with less than ...”

“... weld-mesh fence more than five metres in height surrounds it; beyond that there is an equally high wall particularly difficult to negotiate because at the top there is an anti-escape ‘beak’, a smooth tubular overhang with an angled protrusion on the inner face. Inside the wall and fence, behind a second concrete security ...”

“... out an Atlantic storm on a cramped steamship, found ‘the looking-glass, which is nailed to the wall, sticking fast upon the ceiling. At the same time the door entirely disappears, and a new one is opened in the floor. Then I begin to comprehend that the state-room is standing on its head.’ The subtext is clear. They were on their way to the world turned ...”

“... of art nouveau, the interior columns decorated with chrysanthemums, the walnut and sequoia wall panels with scenes from Ben Jonson (who drank in the Palsgrave Tavern which once stood here). Alongside the noisy travail of the born-again legal system and its new emporium, novel administrative structures had been quietly growing. These were to transform ...”

“... To approach the political side of the scandal, we cannot do better than ask why the editors of the Wall Street Journal seem to hate Clinton so much. Having supported free trade, installed Goldman Sachs’s Robert Rubin to preside over the American economy, and retained and deferred to Alan Greenspan, Clinton has obviously been a good President for the business ...”

“... This morning there is a man in a short black coat running across a high brick wall; a hunchbacked fly springing sticky-fingered from perch to perch, before dropping heavily into the street. The wall – weathered yellow brick grouted with carbon deposits and grime – is enough of a barrier to have doubled in television films, cop shows or faked documentaries as the exterior of a prison ...”

“... Fictional representations of real events from Hillsborough to the Stephen Lawrence case – mostly in the form of plays and television dramas – have played a surprisingly large part in shaping national debates about the police and police culture. Novels, however, tend either to use the figure of the detective to investigate larger questions than those of routine police work, or to fall back on the conventional oppositions (efficiency and incompetence, probity and graft) which tend to prop up the morphology of the fictional plod ...”

“... to be a mysterious cove comprehensible only to his pals (among whom Waugh did not number himself). Stephen Spender, Waugh declared, had been granted at birth all the fashionable literary neuroses but his fairy godmother ‘quite forgot the gift of literary skill’. (Once celebrated as the Shelley of the Thirties, he was later described by Geoffrey Grigson as ...”

“... to the Accademia in 1873. Indeed, in the photograph in the book you can see the panelling on the wall behind it. The impression of more plod than inspiration is backed up by the publishers, who present a slab of book ten inches by seven by one and a half, in which the plentiful photographs are reproduced, not very well, between regular white margins. The ...”

“... the labels; c) to inspect the cases carefully – conceptual art wasn’t made just to hang on the wall; and d) to remember that though conceptualists revelled in lists, schemes, systems and graphs, a work’s format was never an end in itself. From the beginning, precisely just what kind of art conceptualism was – and what sort of artist produced it – was ...”