“... Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can’t be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison ...”

“... On the first day of Christmas, more bishops will be thinking about global warming than adultery, or so a survey by the Church of England General Synod reported in January … Strange, then, that we hear so little from the Church about the desecration of God’s earth. Perhaps your parish priest needs prompting? Jonathon Porritt, Country Living, December 1996 Priest: With sorrow for misusing and abusing the beauty and resources of the earth, we pray to the Lord ...”

“... tramping through the dunes with my Tuareg informant, Mohamed Ali, while a camel train trudged by with a load of gravestone-sized slabs of salt from the mines at Taoudeni. We were talking about our families, and I showed Mohamed a photograph of my youngest daughter on a pony, taken when she was 15. He immediately offered 200 camels for her, with or without ...”

“... Football is not just the ‘beautiful game’, it is the ‘world game’; something not simply to be played or watched, but an activity powered by all the resources of global wealth and technology. It is, for example, obvious in this country that football is slowly eliminating alternative sports, even ones deeply grounded ...”

“... gets into the family car and drives off. The next shot shows her sitting on a beach, illuminated by the car’s headlights, her shoeless feet digging into the sand. She calls her father on her cellphone, crying, says she loves him and her mother no matter what happens. In the next shot she is dead, her leg broken upwards at an impossible angle, the heel of ...”

“... of its title sit a little heavily on I’m Thinking of Ending Things, originally a novel by Iain Reid, which Charlie Kaufman has now adapted as a movie (on Netflix). Out of context, I’m Thinking of Ending Things strongly suggests the possibility of suicide. In context too, as it happens. However, in both Reid and Kaufman’s versions it also evokes ...”

“... No such luck, of course, something has to happen even in a slow and glossy movie. He starts off by dealing with a theft in Jerusalem, runs into the titular murder on the Orient Express, and at the end is summoned to a sequel, I mean to Egypt for a job that sounds as if it might involve a death on the Nile. Hercule Poirot has been escaping from print into ...”

“... taking in his native Isle of Man and become a professional photographer. His head had been turned by Cartier-Bresson’s 1954 image of a small boy hefting two large wine bottles, which he spotted in the pages of Paris Match. For a while, Killip pursued a career on strict 1960s Bailey-Blowup lines: he moved to London as assistant to Justin de ...”

“... stage and studio: ‘I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long ... I work in the shade because sunshine creates shadows, highlights, accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look.’ This explains the even, clinical light which bathes the portraits. Nothing is in shadow. The finest details of ...”

“... Several authors have died in the course of Britain’s current and by now customary hard winter. V.S. Pritchett writes, nearby, about one of them, and I would like to write about another – the novelist, Barbara Pym. To think of her in relation to a literary world, with its apparatus of publicity and reward, gives a sense of incongruity, but, of course, there’s a tale that hangs on the connection – the story of how this world turned from her in middle age, after her work of the Fifties, which was indeed ‘of the Fifties’ to a degree that was barely understood at the time ...”

“... Loder, the Fifth Form Cad, is being blackmailed by Hogg, the new School Butler: unless Loder gives Hogg £10, Hogg will go to the Head and report Loder for smoking and drinking in the Saloon Bar of the Black Ape; whereupon Loder will be sacked. ‘I don’t care so much for myself,’ sobs Loder to Tom Merry, the Hero of the Shell: ‘It’s my parents; the disgrace will kill them ...”

“... the stages of nature as they have changed through the successive periods of British prehistory. David Stoddart’s conclave of geographers engage in a philosophical exploration of geography itself. It is always a pleasure to find a tribute to the schoolroom. Richard Muir was fortunate to have an inspiring teacher who contrived to overcome ‘the tedious O ...”

“... sure she won a scholarship to extend her studies, chiefly – it seems – so that she wouldn’t be forced to go back home. In 1926 she wrote to a friend from her parents’ house: ‘Here I am plunged in the middle of Benares brass life, and Japanese screens … I am too depressed by the hideousness … and the ...”

“... me, the 2003 online version of the Grauniad with its central column of boxed pictures will always be the true Guardian website. The Guardian received many of my ‘liars’: it initially supported the war.I was reminded of how I felt in those days during the opening scene of Official Secrets, which stars Keira Knightley. (I took a perverse liking to her when ...”

“... are themselves pulled along. While engaged in drawing, we are aware that there is something yet to be brought into sight, some impact on the surface that is yet to be delivered. As long as the activity lasts, there are lures ahead: objects of vision, whether ‘in here’ or ‘out there’, impulses to animate and to ...”