“... one point he describes the present Queen Mother as ‘blessed with typically Celtic good looks: black hair, blue eyes and a skin like cream’, when any modern student of the subject could have begun the sentence in the same way and gone on with: ‘gingery pube-like rug, yellowish eyes and a hide like a pizza’.) But he is a writer of the pre-daylight ...”

“... columnists for whom nothing you can buy at the Ann Summers shops out-performs freshly-ground black pepper. Cookery is the ultimate quietism in circles where the alternative is a prosperous but discontented leisure. It is the least contentious of the useful arts, except within the band of its own practitioners, who squabble without issue, like the ...”

“... of excess and burn-out. Two others are those of the undertaker and the gambler. Baudelaire’s black garb echoes the undertaker’s habit, which in the Salon de 1846 he described as the uniform of his century. The poetry is like the rehearsal of a funeral, an extended act of mourning, though whether for himself or itself is not always clear (at ...”

“... the port and nuts (before the brandy stage): Thou who when cares attack, bidst them avaunt and black Care from the horseman’s back, vaulting unseatest. Sweet when blah blah in clay, sweet when they’ve cleared away Lunch and at close of day, Possibly sweetest. Calverley goes on to heap scorn on those who impugn the habit, ridiculing the notion that it ...”

“... clear that it’s not all fun and games while trying not to let the comedy become too desperately black or too sappily wry. Being creatives, ‘we’ naturally include a number of would-be writers, among them Don Blattner, author of non-saleable screenplays, and Hank Neary, who’s working on a ‘small, angry book about work’. Ferris wants it to be known ...”

“... love. I have never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been ...”

“... Through the words of Raimundo Dusa (the dandy and brother of the abducted Corrado Dusa) and Christopher Blake (an English journalist), and through an authorial account of Tomaso, one of the terrorists, Massie with great economy constructs a history of Italy since the war, the thirty, ostensibly prosperous years of Christian Democracy, the growth of ...”

“... before things started to go downhill. In The All-American Skin Game, a collection of essays by the black blues writer Stanley Crouch, I came across a tribute which shows the depth and range of feeling that the lady was capable – very probably to her own surprise – of evoking:Gatherings of domestic workers in my mother’s kitchen would admire her poise and ...”

“... action on human experience’, as Moody has put it. This is also a central preoccupation of The Black Veil (2002), a wildly digressive memoir of the novelist’s adolescent and post-collegiate troubles with drink, drugs and depression. Moody blackens numerous pages with free-associating meditations on Hawthorne’s ‘The Minister’s ...”

“... its implications. This is a good period for English poetry. Not only is there Raine. There is also Christopher Reid, whose work bears a sufficient similarity to that of Raine for one to talk of a Martian school. Arcadia, Reid’s first collection, is an elegant and original book whose virtues remind one of the world of painting. It is not surprising that ...”

“... says the shadowy figure who may or may not be responsible for the double murder that closes The Black Book (Kara Kitap, 1990; translated in 1994). ‘In the land of the defeated and oppressed, to be is to be someone else. I am someone else; therefore I am.’ The land he’s talking about is Turkey, where, many of Pamuk’s characters believe, an authentic ...”

“... There’s a moment in this book – some time in the 1960s – when Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell have been asked to Hintlesham Hall in Suffolk to do a poetry reading. They ring the doorbell and a liveried footman tells them that they should go to the servants’ entrance. ‘I said, let’s leave. “No,” Adrian said ...”

“... of what? (He wrote to his mother about the disgust he felt at being offered the sacrament by a black clergyman in Sierra Leone; again we don’t learn what, if anything, Queen Mary advised him in return.) The Nazi seizure of power convinced him that at last something was being done to arrest the general rot. Count Mensdorff, a former Austrian Ambassador to ...”

“... Rothko himself deliberately inflicted on his final, nearly colourless paintings of grey and matte black, like window blinds drawn down. If Rothko’s fortunes, so to speak, are still robust, with sales this spring at Sotheby’s and at Christie’s expected to net from $30 million to $60 million a painting, something has changed in our relation to Abstract ...”

“... shade smoothly into each other and perhaps give the impression of cream, or pale sand. Its beak is black, its claws are brown; it has black wingtips and a dark streak leading from the back of each eye. Its legs are often described by observers as ‘milky-white’. In the early 19th century there was some experimenting with ...”