“... is not, it emerges, his seamy career in espionage, but the relationship with his own father Richard (‘Rick’), who has just died. In addition to his employer’s top secrets, Magnus has another box with him. This is his father’s old green filing-cabinet, which at last he has prised open. Rick Pym was, like Cornwell’s father, a confidence man ...”

“... Thoroughly Arnoldian, the Academy set about eradicating the ‘taint of the provincial’ from English culture, and looked forward to the salvation of the nation by ‘disinterested’ intellect. The paper foundered on the low-mindedness of its publisher (Murray), who wanted more advertisements. The editor, Charles Appleton, took the path of noble ...”

“... Three: one of the differences between Ireland and England is that in Ireland ‘the conventions of English Romanticism, its blessings in the gentle woods, its brooks that murmur and its winds that cry, were simply implausible.’ Irish landscape is determined rather by individual acts of will, violent and transient. Hence ‘ruined castles, ruined ...”

“... the correct form for telling him my age. Instead of asking it, however, he laughed and said in English: ‘No, you are not from London. You are from Pakistan.’ I informed him haughtily that I was British, born and bred. ‘No, no. How can you be from London when you dress like a Pakistani?’ ‘Look at my passport – you’ll see it’s one from ...”

“... Also, the music making, instead of being schmaltzy and to be taken critically, had become hearty English party singing, and sweet, well-loved waltzes. This afternoon Max put the company through five hours of hair-splitting Notes; and there was smouldering anger about the place, the result of many days of unrest. The preview tonight was both better and ...”

“... York during World War Two. Among his own contemporaries (aside from two pieces, dropped from the English edition, on his friends Philippe Sollers and Jean-Paul Enthoven), Lévy only engages in discussions of the political philosopher Luc Ferry and with Régis Debray, and perhaps because he suspects that this is too lowkey, he ends the book with a nostalgic ...”

“... makes his favourite writers sound rather like a squad of marines, or weekend hikers. Writing about Richard Eberhart in 1960, for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a ...”

“... man. A book, In the Wake of a Deadad, would emerge. Even silence – Paul Auster, Dinos Chapman, Richard Wentworth – would be published. ‘No reply’ becomes part of the texture, along with hesitations, prevarications, confessions. Many of the respondents turn Kötting’s challenge back on themselves: their refusal to look into the eyes of a lifeless ...”

“... beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public ...”

“... Erminia, who loves a Christian. Although Linnaean classifications were ‘too smutty’ for English women – all those reproductive organs – she was an ardent botanist, and sent expeditions to Africa, to bring back geraniums. While other bluestockings might have found themselves unmarriageable, her father’s early death had left her everything, and ...”

“... available Arab – by reading across a wide range of scholarship, fiction, poetry and art, mostly English and French, all of it produced in the imperial era. The threat – and the allure – of North Africa had always lain just beneath the surface. But by 1962 the Arab world was no longer under direct European control, and those dangers seemed imminent. From ...”

“... artists rather flatters whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and Wilton, a Venturi ‘shed’ avant la ...”

“... early that it was my duty to imitate them’), and his making his son do ‘exercises in early English history and the book of the Peerage’. When Harry proudly performs his knowledge, he comes to expect their landlady’s ‘invariable whisper: “Blood Rile,” she said; and her friends all said “No!” like the run of a finger down a ...”

“... Rather than cataloguing the achievements of the ‘Oxbridge sporting gents’ who dominated English natural history in the 1830s, and who have subsequently preoccupied historians of 19th-century biology, Desmond excavates the ‘radical underworld’ of science, and in particular of medicine. The inhabitants of this subterranean realm constituted a ...”

“... in the worst fears of his mother, it is only he who can ever enunciate (for once, in ‘normal’ English) the adultery of his father. Only he manages to offer any hope of comfort to his aunt, lost in apparently inconsolable grief at the recent death of her son. And in doing this he serves to call into question all our certainties about good ...”