“... beard was felt to be potentially damaging to the studio, but a board meeting concluded they had no power to make him shave. This was the studio and the community in which, little more than a year later, and having taught himself cinema, Welles made Citizen Kane: still revolutionary, still dazzling half a century on. This was the community which, deeply ...”

“... was 56 years old when he left Paris for Sicily in the early summer of 1933. It seems clear he had no intention of ever returning to France. His theatrical extravaganzas, legendary generosity and eccentric lifestyle had consumed the bulk of his colossal fortune. He was addicted to drugs. One morning in his hotel in Palermo he opened a vein in his wrist in the ...”

“... may have been panelling and frescoes in the residences of the Parisian nobility, but there was no stimmung: no sense of interior intimacy about the place. For this we must travel to late 17th-century Kristiana in Norway, where Frederik Jacobsen Brun lives with his wife Marthe. The Bruns have installed smoke-free ...”

“... this year, I came across one essay that felt deeply odd in some not quite human way, but I had no tangible evidence that anything untoward had occurred, so that was that.)It’s because ‘plagiarism’ is taken so seriously in the academy that we hold formal hearings at which the student being accused can challenge the claim or at least outline mitigating ...”

“... kibbutz on the banks of the Susquehannah river in Pennsylvania, where, since there would be no private property and hence no incentive to misbehave, they might confidently look forward to a good life of honest toil, philosophising and poetry. Coleridge, thinking a new word necessary for so innovative a departure in ...”

“... the persons who had invited me; they seemed quite satisfied; they evidently thought that there was no difference between laying a table in play and laying it for an actual meal; for them imaginary life and real life were the same thing.To give a child a doll’s tea set instead of a real one was a ‘careless error’, Montessori thought, a delusion. Children ...”

“... who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room at the Top fame will later come into the same category.The only writer she does read with any regularity, though, has nothing to do with the North at all. This is Beverley Nichols, of whose column in Woman’s Own she is a devoted fan, and ...”

“... a response that seems more like the breakdown of a machine than a reaction to threat. The Inca had no precedents for these ‘rough, milk-skinned men with hair drooling from their chins instead of from their scalps so that their heads looked upside down, clothed in metal, with avertive eyes, riding strange llama like creatures with silver hoofs’, or for the ...”

“... warehouse. In others, they are encaged behind chain-link fences. In some camps, there are no hot meals. There are outbreaks of chickenpox, flu, measles, scabies and mumps, and infestations of lice. There have been seven known deaths this year.*In the concentration camps for adults, they wear the clothes they arrived in and have ...”

“... sense that outsiders make unfair claims on places, benefits and opportunities to which they have no birthright, and which should, therefore, be denied them; a belief that the removal of strangers whose appearance and manner mark them out as different would cause no new problems and make the natives happier.‘I think ...”

“... locality; places which survived into the 1960s and were familiar to me, too. The St Margaret’s Hall and the Kinema Ballroom, Dunfermline; the Palais, Cowdenbeath; and the ‘Snake Pit’, Rosyth. That wasn’t the last’s real name, which neither my aunt nor I could remember. It was really no more than a big room above ...”

“... McGreevy wrote, are frequently depicted in the pursuit of pleasure, at the circus or music-hall, at race meetings, or simply in conversation with each other. Yet often the expression on their faces suggests restraint, thoughtfulness, an inner discipline. Outwardly they so obviously belong to a more primitive state of society than has ever been depicted ...”

“... British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way. I have always looked to the poet John Hewitt’s manifesto in order to salvage a coherent identity. He wrote: I’m an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am ...”

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”

“... Boot recoiled from what he called ‘the right’ towards what was becoming the centre. Boot could no longer serve up undiluted adulation, as he might have done in his salad days as a young Russian émigré and devotee of the National Review. As an established biographer from within the Washington consensus, he had to distance himself from Reagan’s views on ...”