“... at it on the second lap.Get closer to him but don’t overtake, Paolo said of the orange and black McLaren 720S Coupé up ahead. I put my foot down. The McLaren signalled that it was pulling in, and I whizzed past, feeling quite pleased with myself, even though we’d been told during the technical briefing, with much emphasis, that this wasn’t a ...”

“... simplicity, but its refrain is dense and riddling, close to nursery nonsense: When I was five the black dreams came; Nothing after was quite the same. Come back early or never come. The dark was talking to the dead; The lamp was dark beside my bed. Come back early or never come. When I woke they did not care; Nobody, nobody was there. Come back ...”

“... the grey sky far in the distance; the fall of the drapes; the man’s hand as a cut-out against a black and gold brocaded screen; even the crisp profile of the front step – it is all Architecture epitomised. Architecture meaning permanence, decorum, hard-edged division of spaces. The round stone on its massive base in Happy Union, and the sea-green veining ...”

“... his 13 films, Melville created an austere, sombre aesthetic: even his colour films appear to be in black and white. His protagonists, whether resistants, gangsters or priests, are solitary ‘men without women’, in the words of Volker Schlöndorff, who worked as his assistant in the early 1960s. Driven by duty, they move inexorably towards their fate, which ...”

“... ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and ...”

“... you will not be astonished to learn, was ‘grey’ in the opinion of the Bundys.)Now, I know that Michael Ignatieff was aware of the existence of the above correspondence at least a year ago. And I also urged Bird to send it to him. But the Vietnam drama takes up less than a page of his biography, and mentions Berlin’s real positions not at all. We are ...”

“... with full academicals, lay, neatly folded, inside her suitcase. It was long and severe, of plain black georgette, wholly and unimpeachably correct. Beneath it was an evening dress for the Gaudy Dinner, of a rich petunia colour, excellently cut on restrained lines, with no unbecoming display of back or breast; it would not affront the portraits of dead ...”

“... place. Brophy and Murdoch, who was a decade older, got on immediately. Brophy had just married Michael Levey, whom she’d met at a New Year’s party. ‘I was struck,’ he said, ‘by her blondeness and the unmissable diamond-like quality of her mind.’ Levey was an assistant keeper at the National Gallery, and it took three dates for them to decide to ...”

“... that, in return, doctors would support the NHS. Bevan agreed, and an amending Act was drawn up. Michael Foot, in his recently republished biography of Bevan, concludes that ‘the Minister and the president of the Royal College of Physicians established an accord.’ It was an accord that split the profession (the BMA accused the College of ...”

“... to the psychological impact of forces such as institutionalised racism (he collaborated with the Black sociologist Charles S. Johnson), while his democratic instincts in general introduced a note of human warmth into the chilly atmosphere of the American psychoanalytic establishment.Sullivan died in 1949, by which time Pearce had a thriving practice of her ...”

“... But no one doubts that, a pocket still to be mopped up behind borders that already extend to the Black Sea, they will enter it in due course. The great issue facing the Union lies further east, at the point where no vast steppe confounds the eye, but a long tradition has held that a narrow strip of water separates one world from another. No one has ever ...”

“... most of the women in his life.Whatever reservations Larkin had about his parents (‘days spent in black, twitching, boiling HATE!!!’), by Oxford and adulthood they had modulated, says Motion, into ‘controlled but bitter resentment’. This doesn’t stop Larkin sending poems to his father (‘I crave / The gift of your courage and indifference’) and ...”

“... the ‘Men in White’ – has given way to an ever more circumscribed stratum, a process which Michael Barr, the leading historian of modern Singapore, examines in rich detail. The well-oiled pistons of the market-state are increasingly accompanied by the creaks and squabbles of a Chinese dynasty. The country’s prized state companies are overrun by ...”

“... on, but then skirts. The historical novel – if we except its one great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni, Galdós, Jókai, Sienkiewicz or so many others. The original matrix of this nationalism was the European reaction against Napoleonic ...”

“... in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these ...”