“... camaraderie, the Tories in particular looking with each passing year increasingly like a gaggle of white-collar criminals on day release for a family wedding. Quite how this whole event is a triumph for British democracy is hazy to me. Perhaps the only people who know for sure are the tourists listening to descriptions of the event on their language-friendly ...”

“... in this painting were conditioned by its setting. The church interior is illustrated in black and white to show how the arched vault in the altarpiece echoes that of the chapel in which it is placed and how the pilasters of the painting’s stone frame echo those which mark the entrance to the chapel itself. The lighting on the saints in the painting accords ...”

“... Brazilian Adventure?’ the young travelogue aspirant ventured to ask, to be crisply told that Peter Fleming’s book had sold as an adventure, not as a book about Brazil. Fleming’s two prewar travel books, the Brazilian one and News from Tartary, which is still better, succeeded so well because their author instinctively took to heart the advice of ...”

“... map of sensory life, from some (undetermined) beginning point long ago right up to the present. Peter Charles Hoffer, one of sensory history’s leading exponents, acknowledges both approaches and, to a degree, tries them out in his own study. But his central aim is something more. He wishes to give sensory experience a dynamic role in history as a whole ...”

“... women became a primary subject of her art, and she often featured her young sons, Hans and Peter, in her pictures of proletarian families. Searching self-portraits – Kollwitz produced more than a hundred in all media – also punctuate her oeuvre, which is meticulously surveyed in the current retrospective at MoMA (until 20 July). Largely ...”

“... life, anyway, offers diversions. There is an affectionate portrait of another fellow conscript, Peter Stanford, who feels as passionately as Philip does about books and music and painting. More particularly, they feel the same way about writing. Writers were spies and interpreters who could undergo hardship and excess and emerge from the ordeal with ...”

“... tends to blunt the special and original thrust of the book, that 3000-mile voyage of the great white birds. Fiennes often meets them en route, of course. He arrives at Sand Lake in northern South Dakota on the same day as 340,000 snow geese. He sees them flying in from the south ‘in long skeins and echelons that crossed and undulated, or appeared, by a ...”

“... were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat.’ From his first novel, The Hunters of 1957, a description of fuel tanks jettisoned by ...”

“... of draught animals nor of the wheel. The Anasazi also produced beautiful pottery decorated with white and black geometric designs, built sophisticated irrigation systems and erected astronomical and solar observatories. Man Corn, however, makes no attempt to deal in detail with any of these aspects of Anasazi society. Instead, it concentrates ...”

“... and whimsicalities into the author of ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ and ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’.Stevens met Elsie Viola Moll (née Kachel) in June 1904, during a visit to his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania. He had been living in New York since 1900, and had discovered the hard way that ‘the world holds an unoccupied niche ...”

“... Coates’s Isokon building. It was also in Camden in the late 1960s and early 1970s that this white-walled, abstract, often low-rise high modernism was emulated in social housing, in extraordinary projects such as Alexandra Road or Highgate New Town. This was the first part of the capital – and the country in general – to open itself up to the new ...”

“... and triumphant myths that have remained triumphant: myths, for example, of Luther, as the white knight slaying the Papist dragon, or as a coarse buffoon for ever shitting metaphorically into Papal tiaras, or of a spoil-sport Calvin (responsible of course for Apartheid), or of a Voltairean Erasmus, a mere dilettante in theological matters, or of a ...”

“... 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution. It bears mention that these were all white men – because Epstein was a racist, or because non-white men steered clear of him, or both. From many contenders, Anthony Scaramucci on The Rest Is Politics: US chose the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, as his ...”

“... Inside, under a glass cover, was the embalmed corpse of Ho Chi Minh, two years dead, dressed in a white suit. US troops never found the heavily guarded site, although once, by chance, they landed nearby. A North Vietnamese general told the team from Moscow that if the Americans ever captured the body, Hanoi would be prepared to give all up its US POWs to get ...”

“... clutching a cup of coffee and trying to read Anthony Powell: A Life, the book with the black and white photo of a grumpy man in tweeds on the cover. How Powell would have hated it, I thought, while squatting; all of us going about our little lives in the cramped, blue-upholstered domestic departure lounges of this world. For like most people with few ...”