“... Union, his fourth adult novel, he plays with two genres: the counterfactual, derived from Philip K. Dick; and the noir thriller, derived from Chandler and Hammett. The counterfactual is all in the background. The thriller is all in the foreground. The thematic link between the two is the endlessly precarious nature of Jewishness. Two years ...”

“... What the puritan sees in Bosch’s pictures is the horror of sin. The pious and bloodthirsty Philip II of Spain, a great lover of Bosch, discovered an image of the rift in himself between the lust that tormented him beneath his hair shirt and the ferocious chastisement of Eros that he practised by burning a good many of his subjects at the stake. As for ...”

“... intercut scenes. Misty meadows and fruit ripening in the conservatory are juxtaposed with broken glass and torn fabric. Asya’s first exile is to France; she finds she is pregnant and bears Sergei’s child. She is loved by a poet and a doctor, both Russian, both involved with émigré plots and factions. Then Sergei turns up on her doorstep ...”

“... of herself’. Or, musing on her marriage to Charles and the new obsession with her stepson Philip: ‘She wished passionately that she could be the author of her own life, go back fifteen years and cross out Charles. No, not cross him out; she was very fond of Charles; just marry his son instead of him.’ Sylvie has a ‘marvellously simple’ cure ...”

“... Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to clanking metal, as in Ovid:Where are the ...”

“... When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ‘vision of the British establishment at play ...”

“... In 1939 it received its own building, an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street. A significant extension has followed every twenty years or so, each coolly modernist in style – totally abstract, highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first was conceived by ...”

“... to catch a bedbug: in the middle of the first night, I found two in the bedding, stuck them in a glass and presented them at reception, in hope of a refund, but I was dispatched to another room instead. I stripped the new bed down, doused the sheets and blankets with vodka, remade it, and lay on the covers like an olive in a very damp Martini, trying to ...”

“... is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, famous for introducing the term ‘International Style’, assumed, in Johnson’s phrase, that Wright was ‘the greatest American architect of ...”

“... railway age. The composition and fixing of dyes, the technical complexities of encaustic, stained glass and lustreware, were elusive to an extent that was at first a surprise, then a challenge to 19th-century revivalists. De Morgan had inherited from his parents a methodical, scientific turn of mind which he now found a means of expressing in art. He gave up ...”

“... often made the front page of the New York Times. In 1911, he spent $475,000 on a portrait of Philip IV by Velázquez. But, as Frick noted to a fellow industrialist in 1895, the year he began collecting in earnest, there was ‘more real pleasure’ to be derived from buying works of art than from anything else outside of business: ‘It seems to me ...”

“... be, Lawrence none the less succeeded, as we know, in exciting many of his readers. One of them was Philip Larkin, who always liked and admired Lawrence, considering him a criterion for the literary ‘non-bogus’. But Lawrence would not at all have cared for Larkin’s own use of the pornographic, in its higher or its lower manifestations. For Larkin, like ...”

“... has been explored with varying degrees of insight by writers as different as Francine Prose, Philip Roth, James Hynes and even Jonathan Franzen in the opening pages of The Corrections. The Horned Man, however, is concerned with the campus only up to a point: its world is not self-enclosed, and can hardly be so, set as the college is in a decaying ...”

“... steps, he produced a sub-machine gun and opened fire. ‘The first bullet smashed through the glass security door, sending shards flying into Lock’s face. As he staggered backwards, the gunman fired another volley of shots, shouting in Arabic. The coffee cup and saucer smashed on the marble floor.’ Lock didn’t have time to draw his revolver, which ...”

“... wrong in 1974, when two Jehovah’s Witnesses made a routine call on a Kentish fruit farmer called Philip Noakes, who may have been (can we be sure?) the very last Muggletonian. (His widow still lives, aged 90, but was never a Muggletonian.) At about the same time, E.P. Thompson, who was already interested in the Muggletonian legacy, found his way to ...”