“... qualification. Thus in one speech, ‘the subordinate clauses hung like candelabra.’ He rose above mere lucidity with his ‘still rarer gift of keeping his meaning convoluted and often obscure, yet making his presentation of it compelling and persuasive’. It follows that, although Gladstone increasingly realised that reports in the cheap ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... usually explain the set-up early and clearly. The game can’t start until you know the rules. Peter Carter, falling to earth in his burning plane, accepts his designated death, but falls in love with the radio operator June and thereby somehow falls past it. The rest of A Matter of Life and Death follows from this anomalous case of physical (rather than ...”

“... miraculous however closely you look, makes sunlight dapple the stone with tiny shadows of ivy. Peter Van Lerberghe, a lesser artist, catches a lesser, but no doubt more common, scene of Tintern by moonlight aswarm with tourists climbing over it with torches to make the right dramatic shadows before ticking a now hackneyed experience off the to-see ...”

“... than I’d seen on Anglicans before. I hadn’t heard readings sung before either. The words of 1 Peter 2.18 – ‘Honour the King. Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear’ – sounded less commandingly authoritarian when recited at a sustained G sharp. ‘One pair red trousers’, I scribbled, ‘one orange. Woman in Agatha Christie cloche ...”

“... can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been thinking about for a long time. In 1979 he published his first novel, Kindergarten, a short and desolate work which won the Hawthornden Prize. A meditation on ‘Hansel and Gretel’, the grimmest of tales, Kindergarten describes a world ...”

“... harder than their English counterparts to win lasting admiration. The efforts of Louis XIV, which Peter Burke chronicles in his new book, were truly staggering, even by the standards of Early Modern monarchy. Images of the King were commissioned, Burke recounts, in paint, bronze, stone, tapestry, pastel, enamel, wood, terracotta and wax. The royal treasury ...”

“... the properties of various drugs. Not only do they turn out to be textual paintings, cousin to Peter Davies’s painted list of the top one hundred all-time hit paintings: they effect a stealthy return to Hirst’s pre-occupation with the body and with disease and death. Keith Coventry’s white on white tribute to Malevich conceals portraits, painted in ...”

“... me of Sappho: above all, one magical evening, at dinner out on our terrace, when the moon that rose behind the wooded Lepetymnos mountain ridge above us was indeed, soon after sunset, as Sappho wrote, rhododaktylos, ‘rosy-fingered’, a curious physical phenomenon never experienced elsewhere, and not – it was suddenly clear – just a literary spin-off ...”

“... of the Spanish monarchy declined (despite his efforts, or even because of them), while France rose. The ‘planet king’, Philip IV, was eclipsed by the sun of Louis XIV. History, or the historian at any rate, has little patience with failure. The second reason for the neglect of Olivares is the loss of most of his papers, those notorious papers which he ...”

“... it depended on a competent, energetic and, in this case, diplomatic woman – Eunice Frost – who rose from being Allen Lane’s secretary to having a place on the board. Clark’s ambivalence about being closely associated with the project grew as time passed. He was worried about being seen to promote a faction, and in any case was busy. It was on Frost ...”

“... a social élite to fulfil its predetermined social role’. Like Queller, they want to tear the rose-tinted spectacles from the nose of the conventional wisdom, and present Renaissance education as the inculcation not of liberal values but of a ‘safe conformity’ and a ‘docile attitude towards authority’. The authors associate the view they reject ...”

“... all from which we lived, becomes invisible.’ By 1907, Malevich had become involved with the Blue Rose group of artists, whose roots lay in Symbolism. He exhibited his work at the Moscow Society of Artists, along with Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova and Kandinsky. The following year, he attended the Golden Fleece Salon, an exhibition of two hundred ...”

“... doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is revealing, that textual arm around ...”

“... enamoured, was Harriet Wimsey (née Vane), as she visited Denver Ducis for the first time. Lord Peter assures her that the drive is indeed a mile long, that there are deer in the park, and that peacock do strut upon the terrace. As he observed, ‘all the story-book things are there.’ Similar scenes, evocative rather than detailed, abound in Buchan and ...”