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“... a runner, he would win the 100m and the 5k, but would be best-known for his marathons. His coach, Peter Nielsen, describes him as an ‘incredibly annoying opponent’ because he is happy to grind away for hours at positions most top players would accept as a tie. He often upbraids colleagues who agree to early draws, arguing that they should play out the ...”

“... duplicitous. Writing a self-confessed ‘fan letter’ to Britten about the premiere of Peter Grimes, he is also shooting off a note to the copyist Roy Douglas asking: ‘Did you see or hear “Grimy Peter”?’ Asperities about fellow composers are in plentiful supply. Tippett was another admired ...”

“... came with an additional two units of someone else’s blood to improve my low and unregenerated white blood cell count, and fix the anaemia that showed up in the blood tests they do so regularly. Iatrogenic disorders, but at least we know that the poison in there is killing something, the good along – it’s to be hoped – with the bad and the ugly. So I ...”

“... He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy jacket and the wide-collared white shirt, open to the sternum. He holds a book, closed around his index finger, which is still marking the place. It is as if he has agreed to stop reading for just a moment, so that the photo can be taken. He stares straight at the camera and his expression ...”

“... in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by’. It struck him as ‘a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far behind’. Later, after the Japanese invasion of 1937 but before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the ...”

“... his trousers, along with England team manager Keith Fletcher, to a meeting with the match referee Peter Burge, reputedly a stickler for discipline. After a two-hour meeting Burge announced ‘there was nothing untoward’ about Atherton’s ‘unfamiliar action’. He said he accepted the England captain’s explanation, but would not say what it was. The ...”

“... within the meaning of this Bill.’ Perhaps it was because of this piece of logic that Mrs Mary White-house assailed me in the corridor as ‘a disgrace to the Scottish race’. It was not simple pornography or Page Three that worried the promoters of the Bill. Time after time the same example arose – the necessary copulation scene in The Singing ...”

“... in a uniform; what Henry Kissinger used to call (referring demurely to himself) ‘the man on the white horse’? For the Spencer girl, I carry an even sharper blade in my heart. All that rehearsal and all that pre-publicity, with the publicity getting publicity, and then – nada. She revealed that she had been miserable to the point of puking. She disclosed ...”

“... areas of flesh colour, buff and sandy brown are contrasted with neat patterns of black and white and golden-brown clothing, and with the red of wine or cherries and the fresh green of vine leaves – all contained originally (as early inventories invariably indicate) by black frames. But when commissioned to paint larger and more complex narratives he ...”

“... put into play. The story is narrated by a Paul Auster figure, a dedicated novelist called Peter Aaron whose c.v. includes a French apprenticeship, a novel called Luna, even (like his creator) a spell teaching at Princeton. He writes about Sachs, who has confided to him the secret of his final, fatal phase, from an admiring, quizzical standpoint not ...”

“... evolved ‘from ... pictures with titles like... Where the Thrushes Sing... to a Ben Nicholson white relief’. This was not the only drama to hit the 7&5, as it became, paring its name down to go with the work. As Wood left the scene Barbara Hep-worth made her entrance. She had come second in the competition for the Rome scholarship and married the man ...”

“... right enemies (and not find himself finessed so that he’s lined up with Sewell – or the late Peter Fuller) and stay out on the left flank; his fury is rather Victorian – Ruskin’s rage against the immoralism of the Baroque. Oddly enough, Matthew Collings – in the book of his Channel Four series – says many of the same things as Stallabrass; he ...”

“... a legend. The crowd wanted book-heroes.’ (It reminds me of the Beyond the Fringe sketch in which Peter Cook sends Jonathan Miller to his death: ‘We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’) Lawrence seems to have realised that he was most useful as a myth. But only temporarily. He is also interesting in the broader ...”

“... Bryant, in 1987, though other problems intervened and the volume is only now brought to harbour by Peter Marshall, the pre-eminent authority on the late 18th-century British Empire, who took on the task in 2011. The lengthy wait allows Marshall to pay sad tribute to the general editor of the series, Paul Langford, who died in 2015. Independently, Langford’s ...”

“... personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by ...”