“... will just about keep Ann in asparagus over Coronation week, and I am praying that something may be forthcoming from one of the reprint societies, or the films, to offset my meagre returns from what has turned out to be a successful book. There are a few letters to the Flemings’ more famous friends (Somerset Maugham, Claudette Colbert, their Jamaica ...”

“... hope. All lovelessness is bitter. A day will come. I do admire your purpose. When I am killed, you may not fail to want me.However desperate the longing, these full-stopped lines have the numb feeling of words no sooner said than repeated ad nauseam, like passionate love songs heard echoing from a tannoy. Moore enjoys varying a phrase by turning it round and ...”

“... Gallery The curators of her first major solo exhibition in Britain (at Tate Liverpool until 31 May) would rather focus on her diverse practice than her biography, but it’s impossible to make sense of her art without it. The only daughter of a wealthy Lancashire family, Carrington was repeatedly expelled from the Catholic boarding schools her tycoon ...”

“... couldn’t borrow in the market to cover their short-term commitments. But even the least punitive may question whether selective resignations and carefully worded expressions of contrition are enough to restore public trust. It is difficult, if possible at all, to conceive that when Oliver Franks, the epitome of the ‘great and good’ of his day, was ...”

“... part of the reason for his success. His subject matter unavoidably raises the question of how we may speak about unspeakable atrocity. The mind can’t easily process the sheer number of those killed in the course of the Second World War. In such carnage, it’s impossible to imagine the totality, the presence, the surfeit of the lives lost. Yet it’s not ...”

“... as he seems to think it does, better than a writer who provides more conventional endings. Ridgway may give these thoughts to a character who’s a bit crazy, but there’s no getting away from the feeling that he agrees with them. Towards the end of Hawthorn & Child, a violent drifter is holed up in a house he’s broken into, the police are swarming around ...”

“... of sympathies and sensibilities in ways that empirical consensus doesn’t. In the long run, this may well come down to brute biology: if a lion could speak, it would, perhaps, be possible to converse with it about which empirical beliefs are true; but not, I think, about whether eating people is wrong. ‘C’est mon métier,’ says the lion, with a Gallic ...”

“... Freedman from Herculaneum, nor the Dancing Satyr, nor possibly even the Riace bronzes; these may all be no more than public-space fillers made by journeyman blacksmiths. There is one exception, however, which arrives only in the final room, Room 10, devoted to ‘Heads’. Uncovered only in 2004 in Bulgaria, metres away from a royal tomb, it is a ...”

“... taken as far as it has ever been taken by the Moon landings that Kennedy announced as a goal on 25 May 1961. Why? Because we can – maybe. That ‘maybe’ is another part of the reason these feats haven’t been repeated. They were seriously risky. Kittinger’s record-breaking jump was the third in a sequence of three. On the first, he was spun around at ...”

“... the changing relationship of mother and child. Meanwhile the constant for Hiller is a typology she may well have been the first to reveal: who would have guessed that there was a time when all over Britain, photographers were poised to capture the explosive breaking of a wave? The actions behind the work of Kelly and Hiller seem private, even domestic. Yet ...”

“... falling snow, and white lilies are the fragrant flakes that drop onto the ground in the month of May. His metaphors unite antagonistic worlds by mean of an – often violent – leap. The First Solitude (he planned to write four but completed only the first and part of the second) tells the story of a pilgrim, unlucky in love and shipwrecked, who finds ...”

“... tumbling down in flames. There are also pointless fistfights whenever the director feels the going may be slow. Lots of broken windows too. But the abstraction carries an interesting anxiety. The bad guy in Batman Begins, and one of the bad guys in The Dark Knight, is a vigilante like Batman: in the first case a good guy who goes too far (Liam Neeson wants to ...”

“... tells him that he is exceptional. He has so much energy for work, parties, plays, travel. His wife may be tired out, but not him! Not yet. And she is so unhappy; perhaps he even convinces himself that her suffering is caused by the pressures of family life, that she will improve if they are removed. He is insistent: she must go, though he will not brook the ...”

“... those with properties outside London, who took private lodgings only for the ‘season’ between May and July and who might end up somewhere new every year. The owner-occupier was relatively rare, and the working classes and lower middle classes in particular might move in response to rising or falling income, to avoid bad neighbours, to be nearer other ...”

“... cloth of a shirt to turn neighbours who have loved each other into bitter enemies.’ Well, this may be true in the rest of the country, but not in Eskibahçe, where home-grown misbehaviour rarely lasts long. When Rustem Bey sentences his unfaithful wife to death by stoning, a few of the characters are briefly possessed by ‘the evil that emanates as if ...”