“... like gardeners; when they poured coffee and milk into the cups, it was as if they were watering white flower-beds. Trees and kiosks stood on the kerbs, almost as if the trees were selling newspapers.’ From Right and Left (1929): ‘In the gloaming, only the silver birches in the little wood opposite would shimmer, standing amongst the other trees like ...”

“... war and peace are questions of life and death. Not the death of some or even many people, but as Michael Walzer proposes in Arguing about War, the ‘moral as well as physical extinction’ of an entire people. True, it is only rarely that a nation will find its ‘ongoingness’ – its ability ‘to carry on, and also to improve on, a way of life handed ...”

“... you. The cursor returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we hate ...”

“... unaided, Hickey first invokes the work of Chardin and Fragonard and then manages to bring in Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, which he uses to explicate the meaning of the painting’s four looks; five if you include our own nostalgic look at what has now become ‘our gardenia’, a look which ...”

“... equivalent ‘little bugger’, not as cowardly a substitution as the author of this biography, Michael Snyder, seems to think. ‘Motherfucker’ was taboo, but also unfamiliar in a British context. ‘Bugger’ was a robust stand-in.Snyder starts his book with Sitwell’s epiphany but acknowledges the exaggeration behind Purdy’s claim that she had saved ...”

“... his face is also disappointingly generic – a round black visage, a vague thatch of hair and two white circles for eyes. The figure is small – little more than an inch high, in a painting of about eight inches by six – and Tomkins has gone for a shorthand ‘sambo’ caricature rather than any kind of miniaturist detail. A magnifying glass reveals the ...”

“... your lover) and to be offering his publishers a valuable franchise along the lines of the late Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen. From the start, it would have been a frail scheme to rely on. The book’s prologue, in which a Korean labourer, falsely accused of killing a young woman, is beheaded in front of Minami by a military policeman on the day of ...”

“... happened in France – they ran out of gas.’ The excellent American food and wine writer Michael Steinberger now follows Gopnik and the New York Times, concerned that haute cuisine has gone to pot. The disappointment is clear; its cause is not so clear. Is the problem that French cooking is not what it was, or that it is? In Casablanca, Bogie ...”

“... ran an ‘economic emancipation’ campaign on behalf of the Guptas and Duduzane Zuma attacking ‘white monopoly capital’ – as distinguished, presumably, from the Guptas’ non-white monopoly capital. Europe’s largest software maker, SAP, paid kickbacks to a Gupta front company to get its customer service software ...”

“... The service was dignified, the Dean’s sermon well said, the lesson read by a former evacuee, Michael Aspel. ‘A voice was heard in Rama, sobbing in bitter grief; it was Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted.’ The music was magnificent, spoiled only by a soprano warbling something about ‘Sleepy little eyes in a sleepy little ...”

“... masculine, in an attempt to drown out the voices of her lost past. She towers, inappropriately in white lace, over slight young men at Goodwood, or stamps down the London pavements military style, lantern-jawed, heavily upholstered, arms swinging, toes turned out. Gone are the soft smile, the curves and the sleepily sensuous eyes. Now she is angry and huge ...”

“... was unable to come to the conference.’ Perhaps Gilbert was simply busy, or recuperating from a white-water rafting or a hang-gliding contretemps. But of course the words can also be interpreted to mean that Gilbert was invited, but not offered the co-chairmanship. One must be practical after all: the gentlemen of Pennzoil might never have heard of ...”

“... it examines all the problems – especially of lighting (on which there is a valuable essay by Michael Compton) – and documents numerous unfashionable undertakings as well as supplying models for the historical interior decorators. There are things missing from the exhibition and its catalogue: one of the most important rooms in the National ...”

“... now two, to live with my aunt in Essex. After leaving Patrick, I went to live with a writer called Michael Alexander who took me to Afghanistan. Several ‘engagements’ (author’s inverted commas) on and she is living with Johnnie, but he wanted a child of his own before Patrick returned to live with them. So ‘when my aunt brought Patrick to the London ...”

“... of The Old Crowd was Stephen Frears, but in real terms it was LWT and its then head of programmes, Michael Grade. Used as I was to the BBC and to my regular producer, Innes Lloyd, I found LWT entirely well-meaning but awkward to work with only because it wasn’t an organisation geared to producing drama. ...”