“... The people who stopped put both hands on the Ferragamo window and the white light made each one a little blonder. One woman said ‘beautiful’; the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the altar, where a glass case stood ...”

“... by reticence. There was nothing unusual in such circumstances. A child of them was bound to know little of his father. In our family, however, a further shutter fell across his memory. He had spent his life thousands of miles away from Ireland, where he died and we grew up, in a China that ceased to exist as soon as he was gone. We knew he had worked there ...”

“... temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s correspondence with this little cabal breathes with that abject eagerness that was so much a part of the one-time Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. To Alsop he wrote, on 20 April 1966, an account of a dinner with McGeorge Bundy:I have never admired anyone so much, so ...”

“... foundation of the storied ‘Reagan revolution’?Contemporary historians like Theodore Draper, Arthur Schlesinger and Garry Wills, or political journalists like Seymour Hersh, Lou Cannon and Robert Woodward, deal with this difficulty in various ways, but seldom succeed for long in firing the general consciousness. This is because they are either apologists ...”

“... a good deal of his life among English-speaking people. He is one of those German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely ...”

“... in the dramatic forms supplied by Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Fugard found what he needed in Camus’s treatment of Algeria: ‘when I first encountered the articulation of that almost pagan, sensual life lived out in the sun, next to a sea, with warm rocks being, in a sense, the ultimate reality, it struck a ...”

“... adventures that originally belonged to a separate branch of chivalric literature, the tales of Arthur and his Round Table. In the late 15th century this familiar material was handled with sophisticated wit by Luigi Pulci in Medici Florence and Matteo Maria Boiardo in Este Ferrara. Boiardo left his poem Orlando Innamorato unfinished at his death in ...”

“... that it has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children with a Nobel Laureate Week each January. Asked my business at the airport on my way to ...”

“... with what was now being termed an ‘imperial presidency’ (the title of an influential book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, published in 1973, which argued that with superpower status the American executive was exceeding its constitutional prerogatives). The Trilateral Commission – a discussion group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together ...”

“... by mass popular culture. No longer merely a passive lump in an armchair from 7 to 11 p.m., like Arthur Seaton’s father in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Grace finds that the boundary between her own thoughts and corporate thoughts has become unstable. But Smith’s take on the relationship between people and TV is much odder than that. The television ...”

“... ones/draped ones/costumed ones.’ ‘To a Gentleman Friend’ begins: ‘You fooled me you little floating worm.’ An apostrophe to men describes the feminine burden, but it can also be read as an artist’s statement:You are the steady rainThe looked-forsThe must-bes …We turn rainInto diamond fringesBlack cloudsInto pink tulle.Bloemink draws ...”

“... Dramatists, contains a passage germane here: ‘A play of Shakespeare’s and a play of Henry Arthur Jones’s are essentially of the same type, the difference being that Shakespeare is very much greater and Mr Jones very much more skilful.’ This explains a lot when Updike criticises Degas’s ‘unevenness of rendering’: the woman’s dress in Woman ...”

“... thirteenth. Unlucky for some, but we’ll see how it turns out. He received the pint and drank a little more slowly, but half-way through it the temptation to be sick became a necessity that beat insistently against the back of his throat. He fought it off and struggled to light a cigarette. Smoke caught in his windpipe and he had just time enough to push ...”

“... he went to direct the John Innes Horticultural Institution in 1910 (before the five years were up, Arthur Balfour’s benefaction had enabled the University to establish a permanent Professorship of Genetics, held by R.C. Punnett and then R.A. Fisher). MacKenzie is thus wrong in detail, but would in any case have been wrong to regard as necessarily ...”

“... foreign adviser, a Swiss engineer named Alfred Ilg). Americans, Russians, Italians and even Arthur Rimbaud, the poet turned arms dealer, came to do business with the king of Shoa. There had been Italians in Ethiopia from much earlier, mainly missionaries like Father (later Cardinal) Guglielmo Massaia, who had been an adviser to Tewodros, Yohannes and ...”