“... and was sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a place usually reserved for Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy. The book’s success is a categorial surprise, since literary novels hardly ever reach a mass audience in America; but its subject-matter is so perfectly resonant with the tenor of the times that its appeal is transparent. The book ...”

“... works such as El Costeño (c.1843), by the Mexican artist José Agustín Arrieta, which depicts a young man from the Gulf Coast, the entry point for millions of African slaves. We don’t know the subject’s name, but it is clearly a portrait, and the sense of place is captured magnificently by his basket of bright tropical fruit.Even if the display is at ...”

“... tomb of Roger Williams (the founder of Providence, Rhode Island), takes in memorials to Brigham Young, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton, and ends at the grave of Thomas Jefferson – has a distinctly antiquarian flavour. Ruthven believes that myths ‘become plausible when canonised by arts that penetrate the collective cultural psyche’, and he seems ...”

“... an elaborate trap. Using actors pretending to be businessmen, the programme-makers approached Sir Michael Grylls, long-standing Tory MP for North-West Surrey, and introduced themselves as agents for a firm which wanted to smuggle art treasures out of Russia. As a cover for their enterprise, they explained, they wanted to buy a government agency, preferably ...”

“... has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards and the Tory Reform Group.The ...”

“... appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some ...”

“... and on the face of it the least claustrophobic – of his six novels is The Pornographer (1980). Michael, the hero of the book, writes pornography about the endless couplings of characters called the Colonel and Mavis. His work is illicitly circulated in an Ireland dominated by the Catholic Church, and his profession as a pornographer obliquely and ...”

“... better job. Tweed picked up his nickname early on. He began to ‘tote the mail’ for a promising young golfer and looked forward to the first fruits of their partnership: Dillard Clay was ‘a regular prospect and I figured if we hit it off, he could be my ticket to the big show’. The pair went into the final round of their first tournament with victory ...”

“... by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers ...”

“... a Picture Post feature entitled ‘Big City Loneliness’, a state exacerbated on Sundays, was the young Katharine Whitehorn, described by Nead as ‘a journalist who went on to work for Picture Post’, which is a bizarrely emaciated description of one of the most celebrated journalists of her era. The reliance on Picture Post as a point of reference is both ...”

“... people were speechless and sputtered with emotion to see me there. And not only old friends but young people whom I had never seen before.’ The modesty, surprise and sense of a home ‘made strange’ are almost those of a young boy, or an old man whose legend is his parallel life. These glimpses of Renoir’s presence ...”

“... time to give the encounter at Holy Cross a thought. However, later that week I came across a pale young man with a moustache, and wondered where I knew him from. In a surreal moment of social embarrassment, I was at an IRA funeral with him and for a moment, I just couldn’t place him. What made it doubly awkward was that I couldn’t really avoid him. He was ...”

“... years. She had in tow her favourite son Henry, two small daughters, a couple of servants, and a young French artist who was devoted to her, Auguste Hervieu. Mr Trollope was not in attendance. Nor was 12-year-old Anthony. Mrs Trollope’s first destination in America was an Owenite community – Nashoba – in backwoods Tennessee, founded by her ...”

“... thrust his other hand out for alms and the shopkeeper spat neatly into it. Everyone laughed. The young man jerked and flicked his hand, trying to shake off the phlegm; then he made a grimace which was meant to be a smile, and I felt terribly ashamed. The Russian, further spat on and kicked, pushes his way out of the crowd and lies down in the dust. He gets ...”

“... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...”