“... Conrad had written to him. Conrad had based Heart of Darkness on his impressions – he had very little hard, detailed evidence – but, in any case, he did not want to get involved. He wrote to his friend R.B. Cunninghame Graham: He is a Protestant Irishman, pious too. But so was Pizarro. For the rest I can assure you that he is a limpid personality. There ...”

“... imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is mask-like, giving little or nothing away. Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just bored to tears. Charles Baudelaire might be one of the first great poseurs of our time – a not inconsiderable legacy. As with similar images of Baudelaire by Nadar and ...”

“... one of Sayers, from Gaudy Night: Harriet was glad that in these days she could afford her own little car. Her entry into Oxford would bear no resemblance to those earlier arrivals by train. For a few hours longer she could ignore the whimpering ghost of her dead youth and tell herself that she was a stranger and a sojourner, a well-to-do woman with a ...”

“... but how many other films of the period 1907-9 are congenial to modern taste? It seems a little quixotic to expect higher standards of artistic achievement from films that happen to have disabled characters in them. There is the occasional whiff of good intention even in early films, but the results seldom tickle Norden’s nostril. Deaf Mute Girl ...”

“... of hand-tinted, framed family photos: Pancho as a baby, Pancho as a teenager with his mother and a little girl, his daughter Eileen, who lives in El Paso with her mother. Their arms and legs are covered with abscesses, and they are running out of veins – the ‘black tar’ has hardened and blackened one after the other. Pancho and his friend Jaime lower ...”

“... speeches. Afternoon Off has several, because the leading figure is a Chinese waiter with very little English so everybody talks at him. 13 February. As with Havel once, I seem to be the only playwright not personally acquainted with the deceased Arthur Miller and with some line on his life and work. Many of his plays I ...”

“... that we are bound by our social origins to what he calls aesthetic dispositions and have little power to choose otherwise.Denise is a perfect example of Bourdieu’s thesis. As she grows up, she becomes alienated from what Ernaux calls ‘the real’. Or rather, the real of her childhood disappears under the onslaught of the real of school, for which ...”

“... act, where she appears in a simple dress, and yet one soon stops laughing, for every inch of that little figure lives and bewitches. Then her flattering and imploring and embracing; it is incredible what postures she can assume and how every limb and joint acts with her. What sort of ‘incredible’ postures? Poor Martha must have wondered. Elsewhere the ...”

“... with New York, Hamburg or Cologne with Berlin, Milan with Rome, Shanghai with Beijing. Vinen has little that is nice to say about his hometown, but he does finally conclude that Birmingham fits the bill, offering a sharp contrast to the power represented by the Roman colonial capital, London. A city in constant flux, with a bourgeoisie but no aristocracy or ...”

“... like? My father-in-law drank too much, argued too much, did not always show loving-kindness, did little in the way of charitable works, did not go to church (he was a Frenchman, a lapsed Catholic with little formal faith), and fiercely loved and protected his small family with a patriarchal passion, clearly Mediterranean ...”

“... his final say on the subject. This notion I thought grossly self-indulgent. There seemed to be little reason to believe that at his age he could suddenly have found anything interesting to say. And there surely were enough books on Shakespeare already, many of them dull, many of them silly, without the addition of another of which the primary motive was ...”

“... in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his writing apart from endless rounds of socialising and travel. His father was Charles ‘Good-time Charlie’ Merrill, cofounder of Merrill Lynch, who earned his moniker through prodigious accumulation of money and women. James ...”

“... campaign fundraiser for HRC. (Don’t ask, don’t tell.) Yes: Her Herness Herself! A friendly little plush-covered gathering for six hundred at some well-connected Palo Alto dweller’s farcically supersized manse! The next best thing to a private audience with the Hilldebeest! The Many-Horned Hillaria! (Bernie who?) Hellza-poppin’ H-Rod! (Not the ...”

“... seat, in Manchester North West, which had a substantial Jewish electorate. In December 1905 Arthur Balfour resigned after his short, fraught spell as Tory prime minister, and the new Liberal government called an election which they would win by a landslide. Having already spoken against Balfour’s Aliens Bill, which was designed to restrict Jewish ...”

“... had just been laid off from digging the Regent’s Canal, while another member of the committee, Arthur Thistlewood, urged them to bring ‘a spike-nail in the end of a stick or anything that would run into a fellow’s guts’. The subsequent riots were the worst since the Gordon riots of the 1780s, ending in chaos and a humiliating failed attempt to suborn ...”