“... 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 ...”

“... at home in Rome, was as much concerned with compositional elegance as believability: in his Saint Michael and the Devil (1607), the saint props his knee on candyfloss clouds so delicate it’s hard to imagine them taking his weight. Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination (1615-16), by contrast, part of a decorative ceiling in Florence commissioned by ...”

“... she wrote of being an introvert drawn to political activism, a white woman drawn to a black man, and an educated lawyer’s daughter raising mixed-race children alone alongside other single mothers, with dire childcare arrangements and always insufficient funds. Also, she is an agnostic Catholic: this puts her outside both the secular ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... libellous parody contained in Bentham’s Fragment on Government. Far from being the monster of black reaction pilloried by Bentham, Himmelfarb claims that Blackstone was a pioneer of legal simplification, mixed polities and defence of civil liberties, and a major influence upon the American constitution. His views on penology were far more lenient and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... groups fighting the FBI and other federal agencies) makes them uncannily reminiscent of the Black Panthers in the 1960s. We should therefore refuse not only easy liberal contempt for populist fundamentalists (and, even worse, patronising regret at their supposed manipulation), but also the very terms of the culture war. Although radical leftists ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to look for ways of remaining unapologetically gay writers without writing ‘gay novels’. Michael Cunningham won a large readership with The Hours, in which gay lives featured without being allowed to predominate, though his touch seems less sure in his most recent offering, By Nightfall. A narrative about a married man’s brief and inconclusive ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... the terms in which Pamuk’s work has been celebrated by his admirers: ‘a plea for tolerance’, Michael McGaha calls it in his reverential study, Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk,* while the Nobel committee praised Pamuk for being ‘committed to a cultural concept entirely based on understanding and respect for others’. Pamuk’s champions at times seem ...”