“... he looked at it, and saw his own face, and his own salvation, his own sexual nature. And that may be the problem. He saw himself too clearly, settled too many scores with that first book. Too much was fixed in there. Plimpton quotes something he said later on: Do you remember the young boy who goes to a crumbling mansion in search of his father and finds ...”

“... after 1918. ‘Not a great picture,’ Tomkins says of Nude; and Seigel remarks that ‘there may not be many people today who prefer Duchamp’s work to that of, say, Picasso or Matisse – nor should there be.’ It’s true that Nude has become one of the great clichés of Modernism, and a fashionable restaurant in Philadelphia has based its whole ...”

“... was a ‘land of liberty’, though liberty for whom and from what is less clear – freedom may well seem less tangible in a Sports Direct warehouse.Tory politicians have been keen to emphasise that their policy has strictly followed the science, rather than being dictated by any other concern; one of the justifications for the extraordinary powers ...”

“... developments’, quite lacking the crucial quality he called ‘unexpectedness’. The artist may sit down to write with all sorts of intention, but the properly living novel will swiftly evade them: ‘If you try to nail anything down in the novel,’ he wrote, ‘either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.’ There you ...”

“... of a lover will descend into speculations about the other woman (‘Only I wish her eyes may not be blue’). Mew’s own physicality – along with her relish for the physical – comes through strongly in Copus’s book. She had ‘something piquante about her’, a schoolfriend recalled, a way of turning round as she talked, ‘sort of pirouetting ...”

“... record wasn’t perfect either. The plane carrying the first Belgian agent, Emile Tromme, in May 1941 forgot to drop his radio and clothes, and was so far off course that Tromme landed in a German POW camp. The psychological benefit of these heroic failures, however, was significant. News that some agents had arrived in occupied territory, spread by ...”

“... bizarre forgotten episodes in English history. Louis crossed the Channel, landed at Thanet on 21 May 1216 and proceeded to London, then securely in the hands of the rebels, where he was proclaimed king, though not crowned. This invasion, or calling-in if you prefer, was just as much intended as a remedy against arbitrary rule as the invitation to William of ...”

“... It has been thought and the thought has been put into effect.’ The Western model of capitalism may have won – or survived – the Cold War, but so did the bomb. In fact, the bomb proliferated, and new nuclear powers emerged, driven by conflicts scarcely related to superpower confrontation. Thanks to the collapse of communism, we are no longer sure that ...”

“... Near the end of our time at school, we were addressed by the headmaster (this is my memory, but it may have been some other senior member of staff). It was, I guess, an informal version of a commencement address, a send-off with valedictory ethics. The headmaster, a thoughtful Scot, instructed us in how we should comport ourselves in the world. The Etonian, he ...”

“... of the other. People designate as ‘private’ things which others can’t know about them, and may reserve ‘certain particular sins or shames or surprises of joy’ to this realm of the ‘private’. A sense of pitch – of hearing the tonalities of language that convey the existence of other minds and the claims made by the emotions of others – is a ...”

“... a new child. ‘That cow at Number Ten,’ her mother elaborates, is the one to blame. (EastEnders may well have played its part in provoking the Conservative Party’s repeated attempts to revoke the BBC licence fee.) Over the years, such political asides have been a steady accompaniment to the series as it charts the impact of social disadvantage on working ...”

“... detention camp. The right-wing press was agitated by the prospect of her return. Reed’s judgment may have been right in law – his criticisms of the approach of the Court of Appeal are severe – but what stands out is the mode of reasoning he deploys. His judgment is almost impenetrably legalistic, with multiple appellate routes simultaneously ...”

“... diagnosed early, simply because ordinary teachers are more likely to refer a difficult child who may be autistic, and parents will encourage that because there is no longer any stigma and there is more institutional support. The raising of consciousness by autism advocates and others, including novelists, has immeasurably improved the lives of autists not ...”

“... Observations (1917) and the Poems 1909-1925 were dedicated to the memory of Verdenal, who died in May 1915 in the assault on Gallipoli. ‘For Jean Verdenal,’ Eliot’s inscription runs, ‘mort aux Dardanelles,’ followed by an epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘Or puoi la quantitate/comprender dell’amor ch’a te mi scalda,/quando dismento nostra ...”

“... as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world’. In May he and the increasingly unstable Zelda moved to Saint-Raphaël on the French Riviera, partly to escape the dissipations of Great Neck (the model for Gatsby’s West Egg), described by Ring Lardner as ‘a continuous round of parties … covering pretty nearly ...”