“... Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (aka Henry Miller); and Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan as the literary editors. As Dearborn notes in a wonderful chapter on life at the Villa Seurat, Miller’s Paris address, ‘most of the editors were ...”

“... the middle-ranking managerial and technical cadres of industry, proverbially the ICI man-in-the-white-coat; teachers, younger doctors, community workers: people of all kinds who wanted to get on with it, to find scope for their skills and help to build the New Britain. We believed that with Labour and Wilson it could be done. It is important today that we ...”

“... president admonishes US corporations openly on Twitter. But although patrimony is pervasive in the White House, Trump’s political family hasn’t extended very far: we have not seen the emergence of Trumpist oligarchs. What we do see are Trumpist enablers, the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells who have been happy to push through deregulation measures and ...”

“... With its ten million members, it’s bigger than the Freemasons, the Rotarians, the TUC, the White Aryan Resistance, the Samaritans, the KKK, the Women’s Institute and – in terms of weekly attendance – the Church of England. But if AA is big, so is alcoholism. If you accept the modest estimate that 10 per cent of the adult population of this ...”

“... bad it looked on the surface, it was even worse behind the scenes. The long-standing Trump-watcher Michael Wolff, who positioned himself as tittle-tattle-in-chief during those years, wrote a series of books – Fire and Fury, Siege, Landslide – describing the endless tantrums, dressings down and sulks that took place inside the Oval Office. No one was safe ...”

“... including those, such as snakes, which are generally feared. Girl with a kitten and Girl with a white dog are among his best-known early works and two of his most successful recent paintings, entitled, significantly. Double Portrait and Triple Portrait, in fact show only one girl, with a single whippet in the former and a brace of whippets in the latter. As ...”

“... image of Hogg and the bell did as much damage to his career as seizing the Speaker’s mace did to Michael Heseltine’s. Noting in his diary that Hogg was ‘really not safe’, that he was ‘in a very over-excited condition and keeps giving ridiculous “press conferences”’, Macmillan dropped him as Party Chairman. Since it wasn’t possible to make him ...”

“... trophies to the wall. The wood-block floor has been covered with some ‘period-feel’ black and white squared linoleum. The museological debates that such a contrast raises hardly need rehearsing. On the one hand, we readily deplore the stuffy reticence, the wilfully uninformative style of version one – even if, at the same time, we are half-grateful that ...”

“... to place it in the National Gallery. In the following year he consoled himself with Piero’s St Michael, which entered the Gallery after his death. On returning from his Italian travels in 1858, Eastlake would have found his friend Austin Henry Layard working on the proofs of a long article on fresco painting which appeared that October in the Quarterly ...”

“... met his family there, while my eight-year-old daughter was marvelling at his masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It seems strange that an artist such as Jeff Koons can include a gigantic puppy dog in his repertoire, to massive acclaim, while Sandaldjian’s minute Disney figures are admired only by a tiny group of cognoscenti. After all, as ...”

“... Waltons with such longing and attachment that I felt more a part of these families than my own. Michael Landon was my father, and I was Laura Ingalls. Even when Mary Ingalls went blind, I thought I’d rather be her than myself. As far as I was concerned, the American happy family dream was the only dream worth having. And so, I became a Mormon. Wearing a ...”

“... untamed capitalist development, indifference to the environment and disregard for disposable, non-white people has already produced lethal crises – famines, fires and floods – that we mistakenly chalk up to ‘natural causes’ or ‘acts of God’. Dead Cities, a collection of articles written between 1990 and 2002, does not limit its concerns to the ...”

“... in 1704 when his clay crucible (containing kaolinite) was transformed by intense heat into white ceramic. In 1669, phosphorus was isolated by a German alchemist, Hennig Brand, who distilled large volumes of urine, believing it to contain the crucial agent of transmutation, until he was left with a soft metallic substance that glowed, ignited in air and ...”

“... publicity ‘toxic’ and mistrusted the incestuousness of New York literary circles: ‘great white sharks fighting over a bathtub, you know?’ He had other reasons for wanting to stay out west. A former ‘near great’ junior tennis player and adolescent ‘math-wienie’ – in the words of an essay written for Harper’s in 1991 – he loved the ...”

“... he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer regarded by many as the American ...”