“... eager to live, which meant running into the arms of the young. He found two new models: Sylvette David, a young woman with a blonde ponytail, and Paule de Lazerme, a black-haired ‘queen bee’. A different Gilot emerged too, stick thin, like ‘a Romanesque Christ’, embittered by what Picasso had turned her into:I had known from the start that what ...”

“... is the first person/I ever went to bed/with’ – over a teasing, ambiguous duo of brown arcs: breast and thigh? pear and leaf? a foreshortened phallus? In runny paint below the lower arc, the artists have added: ‘wow!’ O’Hara and his friends worked together not only on visual art but on poetic sequences, and on mock-critical documents ...”

“... other things, as a reminder of the attitudes of many in the West to the suffering of black and brown people. Implicitly and explicitly, politicians and commentators have made clear their disparagement, their ignorance, their casual cultural supremacy. ‘This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for ...”

“... through Facebook accounts, until a second message told me he had swapped his father’s surname, Brown, for his mother’s, Lindsay. I typed in ‘William Lindsay’ and there he was: a boy in a EA7 bomber jacket with headphones round his neck, flaming hair and a lopsided smile.When I got back to Glasgow, I learned why my contact had risked his job to give ...”

“... from among the large volume of information that the police received: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. The names came from unreliable sources – an ex-girlfriend, youths with grudges against them. All four had been suspects in connection with previous acts of racial violence. Despite a barrage of teenage estate gossip with all the ...”

“... all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never ...”

“... their right to voice these irrational opinions. I have battled in print against people like David Irving (Hitler’s War), who misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about ...”

“... many of them privatised – are what I see. On the far side of Roman Road are the barracks-style brown brick walkways of the Greenways estate, built in the 1950s, solid and unremarkable, renovated not long ago, providing homes for hundreds; beyond them, its crown poking up beyond the Greenways roof, is Denys Lasdun’s listed Sulkin House, built on the site ...”

“... thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland stone. ABK never recovered, and neither ...”

“... washing sharing the basement, a desolate and grilling public garden, and the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil. This short passage shows a spontaneous poetic flair rarely equalled in Forster’s fiction, or elsewhere in the diaries: ‘those trudging squares and triangles’, both exact and subjective, the complex social irony of the ‘natives ...”

“... of government: McGeorge Bundy, who left the National Security Council to head the Ford Foundation; David Rockefeller, who founded the Trilateral Commission, President Carter’s think tank of choice; and William Burden, Eisenhower’s ambassador to Belgium and a financier whose friendship ensured Brzezinski’s instant admission to the Harbour Club on Mount ...”

“... miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of David Winn, an Etonian contemporary of Francis who also died young.26 August. Do not renew my subscription to the Friends of Regents Park, one of whose aims seems to be to enforce the regulations against cycling in the Park. Ten years ago A. was fined £25 for ...”

“... envisaged both by Article 53 of the convention and by Section 11 of the Human Rights Act itself. David Cameron advocates replacement of the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights and responsibilities entrenched against repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper ...”

“... fantasy tabloid) decisions concerning human rights that have emerged from the courts. Under Gordon Brown, Labour has even shown a tentative interest in extending protection into the realm of social and economic rights: its discussion paper on a bill of rights and responsibilities was widely mocked when it appeared early last year and the idea has been shelved ...”

“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating ...”