“... from?’ then I imagine it is his father who would take the credit. His father was born on 8 May 1900. And it was on 8 May 1956 that Look back in anger opened at the Royal Court. Osborne notes that it is the one unforgettable feast in his calendar. I generally assume that childhoods more or less ended with the First ...”

“... in his immobility he contemplates life as if it were a miniature Zen garden in which only the eyes may walk. Like Cain and Romulus founding cities after their fratricides, Paul’s eventual achievement of singleness is accompanied by the sublimation of his physical self into a new state of identification with the natural world, with the meteors ...”

“... frequently recorded that he had begun a new book on some topic, but in practice any scheme that he may have had which involved arranging his thoughts in a coherent way was always abandoned after a few pages. It is no accident that the most carefully organised body of his statements on any subject, the so-called Treatise on Painting, preserved in a manuscript ...”

“... gets its wires uncrossed. Sighs of relief are heaved but somewhat louder The first bombs fall. It may or may not suit you, But those who are about to die salute ...”

“... These operations were restored to topicality after Charles Richardson’s escape from prison in May 1980 and his subsequent letter to the Times. The first question which needs to be asked is whether such books should be written at all. And if they are written, should any serious notice be taken of them? The existence of violent, sadistic and resourceful ...”

“... to reward or punish those he still had traffic with. It seems from Mr Lenzner’s book that he may have nursed a certain resentment about having so much money, because there was no way he could prevent his family from eventually getting some of it. He found at least a partial solution: in his will he left all his Getty Oil shares, the bulk of his ...”

“... Social prejudice and literary convention conspire, however, to make it difficult, try as one may, to take seriously someone who writes like one of Dickens’s or Smollett’s grotesques. There is abundant evidence, too, that she spoke as she wrote: one aristocratic lady noted that Emma’s pronunciation was ‘very vulgar’; an earl more charitably ...”

“... literary and artistic – Krautheimer’s judgment that he was ‘decidedly no intellectual’ may err on the side of severity. Like his ancestor Agostino Chigi, who had employed Raphael and Baldassare Peruzzi to decorate his villa, Alexander was a great patron of the arts. He does not seem to have cared very much for painting, but he loved ...”

“... phrase fatally unaware of what the word ‘intriguing’ might imply), readers of this book, too, may need reassurance. I have little to give them as far as Shelton’s own opinions, style or narrative ability are concerned. They are, respectively, uninteresting, impoverished and nil. Shelton sees himself as an investigative insider, neither fully privileged ...”

“... introducing commercial television to break the BBC’s monopoly. And look what happened. Reports may get pigeonholed, but they have a tendency to set the agenda for years to come. Thanks to Peacock, what was once scarcely worth consideration is now an option. His book is an entertaining account, mainly of the boardroom battles which have gone on in the BBC ...”

“... Section IV (ii) (d) of this Act it had already been provided that no matter of public interest may be published unless first issued to a duly-accredited lobby correspondent (or registered serf) on the authority of the Office of the Auditors of Official Leaks. Had this provision been enforced, then the Court would not have been troubled by the case now ...”

“... calls his own Earth-history vision ‘punctuated equilibrium’). Single metaphors may blinker the mind no less than single vision. To borrow a phrase Darwin used about his Origin of Species, Gould’s book is one sustained argument, exhilarating, illuminating, challenging. Avoiding the crass Whiggish habit of awarding points for ...”

“... this is a further chapter in Warner’s unfolding of the power – the magical power as it may be – of the magical imagination. Occasionally, her efforts to extol the ‘torrential energies of the irrational’ seem about to lead her into a reflex anti-rationalism, as when she describes the way in which The Arabian Nights taught Goethe ‘how to give ...”

“... perambulations around the changing city. He worked on the buses: ‘Over there, madam, you may espy a Thornycroft ’bus,’ he says. ‘Yonder, by the portico of the Apollo, that there is the Fischer ’bus.’ Audrey works in an umbrella factory and falls in love with an ineffectual radical called Gilbert, under whose influence she becomes a ...”

“... the logic might work the other way round: that’s to say, the experiences of everyday life may influence our brain structures or activities. It has been found that the posterior part of the hippocampus of black-cab drivers is enlarged by comparison with a control group (though one London cabbie told us he didn’t believe a word of it as he’d been a ...”