“... to write directly about paintings if they do not care about them too much. Nothing in the mass of John Koethe’s verse and philosophical prose, for instance, suggests that paintings haunted him continually in anything like the way they did Herbert. (If I do him an injustice, I apologise.) But this seems to have meant that when he spent an hour or two with ...”

“... Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This feels a bit ...”

“... books under review belong to very different genres, both of which are relevant to this task – John Willett’s a critical and historical study based on many years as reviewer, English editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and ...”

“... digression, exposition, all done with stylish dispatch, admirably rendered by the translator, John Howe. Closer to a looped sequence of essays than a memoir, the book nonetheless shows off the memoirist’s skill to stunning effect in three somewhat unflattering portraits – Castro, Guevara and Mitterrand – and reminds us that distance and disloyalty ...”

“... Everyone was connected, one way or another. Three of Albertina’s brothers – Jimmy, Francis and John – joined the occupation, along with their uncle, Eddie. ‘It was like no other department in Cammell Laird’s,’ Albertina says. ‘Because it was all younger lads. And it was full of comedians. It was a joy to go into work. You’d rather go into work ...”

“... recalled. ‘Her dress was a compromise between that of a man and a woman; she wore her hair in a brown, curly crop, and she rode on horseback astride, to the horror of all kirk-going folk.’ In London, Bonheur happily received the attentions of Eastlake and Landseer, though the English weather and the snooping English press (‘the Inquisition’) were less ...”

“... is in dissent, the senior justice in the majority does the assigning. The current chief justice is John Roberts, who was nominated in 2005 by George W. Bush. Clarence Thomas, the most senior associate justice, was nominated in 1991 by George H.W. Bush. Stephen Breyer was nominated in 1994 by Bill Clinton, Samuel Alito in 2005 by George W. Bush, and Sonia ...”

“... role. This is a life which is simply going through the motions, doggedly repeating its lines. John Nower’s fate appears determined in advance by the blood feud he inherits. His only destiny is to revenge his father’s murder and so perpetuate the feud. The strange fusion of Anglo-Saxon attitudes and up-to-date allusion (cars and gangsters and ...”

“... that may be). In 1952 he went all the way to Goa to venerate the body of St Francis Xavier. ‘One brown stump of toe emerging from white wrapping,’ he noted approvingly. ‘Body fully vested, one grey forearm and hand, and grey clay-like skull visible.’ This seems only a step away from the pet cemetery in Forest Lawn, and Waugh’s gleeful interviews with ...”

“... One of Fischer’s sources notes the presence in the SA of these ‘beefsteaks’ who were brown on the outside and red within: ‘There is a joke about two SA men, one of whom complained that there were “so many Nazis” in his company. The other replies: “In our company there are still three, but we’ll soon chase them out.” ’ Problems ...”

“... not dictated by the needs and resources of a local economy. Some thirteen years ago I watched Sir John Habakkuk at a conference sketch out on the board how a drop in the average age of marriage in 1740 of two years, maintained throughout the rest of the century, would explain the whole expansion of 18th-century population in England: but everyone agreed that ...”

“... the morning to write his stuff – but never on Sunday, like Hemingway – and his donning an old brown robe to sit at his desk at dusk, like Balzac. Be that as it may, El Pais’s editorial page is thus made doubly noble by the new Nobel novelist. Recently a letter not to but from the Editor praised the writer’s exemplary habits of punctuality, order and ...”

“... Crossrail advocates happy. For all its faults, they say, Crossrail is good for jobs. When Gordon Brown gave the go-ahead in 2008 he announced that the project would create 30,000 British jobs. No one opposes the creation of 30,000 jobs (though these weren’t necessarily full-time or jobs for the duration of the project), but only a few of the major ...”

“... put nudes in his paintings now that he never got to see any?‘Picasso finds himself in women,’ John Berger wrote. In Gilot he found something else: balance, a degree of harmony. He started new experiments, first with ceramics at the Madoura pottery and then with sculpture, which he took to assembling out of the children’s toys or junk he’d collected on ...”

“... from the lift. When they begin, Butts is living with a lover named Eleanor Rogers but also seeing John Rodker, an aspiring writer who is chiefly known today for his activities as a publisher of deluxe editions: a portfolio of Fifteen Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (1919), Ara Vos Prec by Eliot (1920), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Cantos 17-27 by Pound ...”