“... hotel and miss his train, as he did not want Wilde to think he was avoiding him. ‘This terrible man,’ he wrote, ‘the most dangerous product of modern civilisation – still, as in Florence, accompanied by the young Lord Douglas, the two of them put on the Index in both London and Paris and, were one not so far away, the most compromising companions in ...”

“... horseshit you print in Harper’s Bazaar.’ Mailer’s early success made his struggle ‘to be a man’, as he often called it (dreaming again of Hemingway), into a struggle to distinguish reality from everything around it. Lennon understands what Mailer was up against: he was up against himself, up against the failure of the novels after his first one to ...”

“... including that collie) is only 25, and not long divorced, but she ‘cannot remember the man who used to be her husband. He was probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate.’ Her amnesia isn’t straightforwardly self-protective, since one of the things she does remember is her husband saying, when she was in hospital to give ...”

“... that ‘there are a thousand unnoticed openings ... which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul’ should degenerate into nonsense, and Fielding differentiated his honest characters, the naive and the stupid, from their victimisers, the hypocritical and fraudulent, according to whether they depended on physical appearance to reveal or conceal ...”

“... is seen as a source of national shame. Interviewed in Le Monde, Jacques Thuillier of the Collège de France complained that, ‘à l’étranger’, Poussin’s reputation had been dulled if not sullied; the quatercentenary of his birth was an opportunity to clean and polish his image to its true lustre, to show the world that the artist was (in the words of ...”

“... Michel Leiris recalls his mother warning him to beware of ‘bad people’ in the Bois de Boulogne. He imagined the predators in the woods to be ‘satyrs’, and later, cannibals: he had been struck by an exotic colour illustration in Le Pêle-Mêle, a humorous weekly, of ‘savages’ eating an explorer. Leiris (b. 1901) went on to become an ...”

“... and patriotism. The picture returned to France the same year, into the collection of Isaac de Camondo, and is now in the Musée d’Orsay.It’s inviting to assume that by the 1870s British and French art were on separate and deeply divergent tracks: Pre-Raphaelitism versus Impressionism, sentimental moralism versus non-narrative realism; though with ...”

“... keeping it for him. He visited us occasionally in Dundee, a better-looking and more powerful man than his older brother Jack, my grandfather, and projecting a sense of confidence and certainty. Although there was an Indian restaurant in Broughty Ferry my parents never ate there or ordered in and, when Robin visited, my mother cooked the lamb curry ...”

“... I called Julian Harp, who solves the problem of engineless flight. He recognises that when a man lies on his stomach and flaps his arms, the wing-tips point forward instead of back like a bird’s: so he must contrive the means to fly lying on his back, and he succeeds, constructing models, and then his final set of wings, out of the struts of umbrellas ...”

“... won a couple of majors and became the number one golfer in the world. Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France. Then came the London Olympics, about which there was a lot of national grumbling, until they started. Britain ended up third in the medals table, behind China and the US. Andy Murray won the US Open in tennis. Justin Rose won it in golf. This ...”

“... living in England and France and dreaming of the frontier, the second by a self-described ‘man without a country’, an American brought up in England and Ireland who, writing in Los Angeles, longed for the country from which he had exiled himself. We are undergoing a Chandler revival. The Library of America has published his complete works in two ...”

“... and sees that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected ...”

“... the fragile security of the nursery, suffers a metaphoric death when taken from his domestic Eden. De Quincey, who writes obsessively of such processes of bereavement, is inclined to make a fact of the metaphor: ‘The rules of Eton require that a boy on the foundation should be there twelve years: he is superannuated at eighteen, consequently he must come at ...”

“... Last year, the Society of St Vincent de Paul spent €6.1 million giving people in Ireland food. This year, it says that requests for food are up 50 per cent, that calls in general are up 35 per cent and in Dublin 50 per cent, and that 25 per cent of callers are new clients, many of whom were contributors to the charity at the church gates last year ...”