“... on 120, crossing from California to Nevada at some point along the way, then a stretch along the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, Route 6, over to the small town of Basalt, another hundred or so miles up to 50. At first the country was high enough that it was green, beautiful and stark and treeless, until the altitude climbed a little into piñon-pine and ...”

“... can say you are.’ As with the opposition, the toilet doors ‘bang increasingly frequently’. David Kirk, acting captain from the start of the tournament: ‘Remember, you’re the All Blacks. You carry with you the memory of the past. That’s a force.’ Andy Dalton, the nominated captain who failed to play a single match because of a training ...”

“... of a critic who’d had the temerity to ignore Satie’s contribution to the Ballets Russes’ Grand French Festival. Satie was already mixing with a different crowd. He had met Man Ray at an exhibition of Ray’s work in 1921, and they’d gone drinking together. (On his way back to the gallery Ray bought a box of tacks and an iron, glued them ...”

“... tasteless plutocrat at a villa he built in Mallorca, where according to his English biographer, David Bellos, in Romain Gary: A Tall Story (2010), ‘he mostly ignored the people he invited, prowled around looking glum and subjected everyone to the various strange diets he took up to keep himself in shape.’ By the 1970s he was unalterably fixed as a ...”

“... where they ran an inn, Carlo’s, on the left bank of the Arno, which catered for the flow of Grand Tourists from England and Scotland. Even the most sophisticated of travellers might be homesick and the painter Thomas Jones was one of those who found that the ‘increasing phantom’ of loneliness disappeared at the inn ‘where we lived in the English ...”

“... as Gilroy says, shepherding the development of Black Arts charities and the building of David Adjaye’s Rivington Place, the first permanent public space in England ‘dedicated to diversity in the visual arts’. But he was horrified, too, by the way cultural studies as an academic discipline had developed, especially in the US. It had ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... forget about them.’Garland, born Frances Ethel Gumm, the youngest of three musical sisters from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, seems to have fared worse than most of the stars at MGM. One reason was that the start of her career there coincided with the loss of her father, Frank Gumm, a small-town vaudevillian. Her first stage performance, at the age of two, was ...”

“... the survivors with machine-gun fire. More than two hundred were killed. The prime minister, David Ben Gurion, instructed Yigal Allon, the operation’s leader, to deport the surviving residents. Another commander, Yitzhak Rabin, issued the order: ‘The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.’ These and other episodes of ...”

“... envied the men their licence to experience and capture the look of real action. The photographer David Scherman, her new American chum and lover, from whom she learned a lot, pointed out that she was ‘a perfectly bona fide Yank from Poughkeepsie’ and could herself qualify for such a job; so with Withers’s backing she sought and received accreditation ...”

“... of reading silently to oneself, as private carrels and cloisters were torn out and replaced with grand public rooms. And the miniaturisation of the book, hastened in 1501 when the Italian printer Aldus Manutius introduced the pocket-sized octavo format, brought reading out of libraries into everyday life. ‘As our ancestors imbued their minds with the ...”

“... been an entirely pragmatic membership, never an idealistic one. We never bought into Europe as a grand projet, or even an expression of fraternity. All this makes it hard for many here to imagine that idealism about the EU still has breath and life within Europe. After the Brexit vote, many of my European friends expressed disbelief and astonishment. It ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would ...”

“... all?’ she once asked me, and I put the line into Habeas Corpus and got a big laugh on it. From a grand Irish family she was quite snobbish and talking of someone she said: ‘Then he married a Mitford … but that’s a stage everybody goes through.’ Even the most ordinary remark would be given her own particular twist, and she could be quite ...”