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“... limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The Easter Parade ...”

“... pictures, statues, vineyards, the Italian sky, dark-eyed peasants, opera-music, Raphael and old Michael, ‘Childe Harold’, the ‘Marble Faun’, ‘Romola’, and ever so many more ingredients, – the whole having I think taken me pretty well off my feet! Perhaps I ought to add Henry James. He has been perfectly charming to me for the last three ...”

“... Celebration was concerned, modern ended in the 1930s. The future as defined by the brochure from Michael Eisner’s Disney Corporation was to be found not in Walt’s skyscrapers and monorails, but in a long-lost past of white picket fences and pastel dormer windows, so lost that perhaps it was entirely mythic: There was once a place where neighbours ...”

“... he joined the RAF and performed in Ralph Reader’s Gang Shows. Soon afterwards he teamed up with Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan to form The Goons: slightly wearing to listen to now (I suppose you had to be there at the time) but routinely credited with having ‘revolutionised British post-war comedy’ – unless that was Monty Python or ...”

“... in for a spot of incest and unmarried motherhood – in A Certain Justice we are even given a ‘black smudge of pubic hair’ – but they still feel more at home grousing about the lower orders or condemning as racist the charge that the Metropolitan Police Force is institutionally racist. One might define fiction as the kind of writing in which it is ...”

“... did so expertly on existing myths of national identity and history. Not until now, however, with Michael Bartholomew’s biography, has much been known about Morton. Bartholomew’s book is an unexpectedly enlightening read. It turns out that the narrator of Morton’s travel books was an invention of their author, whose own life, personality, views and ...”

“... I saw the smooth while skin of your mother’s breast. Removing a dirty dressing, and finding a black patch of necrotic tissue, I imagined placing delicate kisses on her belly. Encountering death, I remembered her clinging to me and gasping with pleasure on a bench at the back of the hospital lobby. Wherever my eye fell, wherever I saw disease, or ...”

“... Taylor tolerates, to drive off and catch the ten something Fort-William-to-Glasgow bus across the Black Mount from Kingshouse to Bridge of Orchy. Clearly the road was built without expecting people to wait for buses on it: we have to climb down a steep bank, avoiding a vast pool of dark fluid and some abandoned car upholstery whenever things drive by close to ...”

“... sounds ad feminam (Dick was in her sixties at the time), the Guardian obituary of her by Michael De-la-Noy in 2001 outdid it, describing Dick as ‘a talented woman bedevilled by ingratitude and a kind of manic desire to avenge totally imaginary wrongs’, a woman who ‘expended far more energy in pursuing personal vendettas and romantic lesbian ...”

“... in Kisumu were quick to react. From a distance an urban riot in Kenya is signalled by plumes of black smoke rising into the sky. Further in, tear gas prickles at the back of the nose and throat and stings the eyes. Then the sound of shouting, breaking glass, splintering rocks. Finally the sight of hundreds of young men, flaming barricades and boulders ...”

“... old men. Her exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was full of them. She visits the elderly Michael Hamburger at his Suffolk farmhouse with her movie camera, zooming in on the wonky doorways, the rotting window frames, the overgrown garden, the teetering piles of books – an old poet’s props. She watches as he inspects his apple orchard, the wind in ...”

“... that gives his prose its precision. These letters and the diaries are Maitland’s chief source. Michael Asher’s fine Thesiger: A Biography (1994) chiefly relied on conversations with Thesiger and those who had known him, supplemented by the published works. Now, Maitland’s painstaking use and critical correlation of the Thesiger papers allows him to ...”

“... Constable favoured the rich chiaroscuro and dramatic tonal contrasts of mezzotint, printed in rich black, represented here by five large plates of some of his most famous later paintings by David Lucas, who, by careful obedience to the painter’s obsessive instructions, and by evident sympathy with his unorthodox way with paint, somehow seems to produce in ...”

“... quilted texture that you see on the faces of ageing women in hot countries. Her robe was leaden black and the dress beneath was neither blue nor red, but a souring white. Yet it was not this that had troubled me. No, my discomfort stemmed from the hard, hollow gaze which met mine. It had the anguished persistence of a suffering thing, as if the ...”

“... thinking, to deduce x: the identity of the murderer. Take, by way of concrete illustration, Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging (1936). The president in question is Dr Josiah Umpleby, head of St Anthony’s College, Oxbridge (not to be confused with St Antony’s, Oxford, which wasn’t founded till 1950; Innes’s setting is a ...”