“... In the longest-established endurance horse race, the one-hundred-mile Tevis Cup, the record is held by a horse called R.C. Hans, who completed the course in 10 hours and 46 minutes; only nine times since 1961, when records began, has the race been won in under 12 hours. Defoe and Ainsworth were thus describing horses going twice as far (and therefore twice ...”

“... to convict but who (it had been decided) were too dangerous to set free. These prisoners would be held indefinitely under a new legal dispensation still to be devised. Preventive detention was a step President Nixon had proposed to Congress in 1970, but he never found the support or the temerity to put the programme into effect. Yet here was a Democratic ...”

“... intervention. ‘The miracle happened in that film emulsion. Who knows why?’ Writing in 1975, David Thomson compared Garbo to Christ – there were times in their lives when all they wanted was to be left alone – before concluding with a reiteration of the same ‘mysterious truth’: ‘She was photographed. She was all in the silver.’ Whether Garbo ...”

“... books complement one another uncannily, as though the authors, like the two campus novelists in David Lodge’s Small World, had agreed to divide up the world between them. By secret treaty, as it were, O’Keeffe got to do facts, and Edwards opinions. The opinions, it should at once be said, are the fruit of immense dedication. Edwards has written widely ...”

“... British children had been reduced. These memories were refreshed by reading Austerity Britain, David Kynaston’s huge history of the country between 1945 and 1951. It is difficult for anyone familiar only with the shimmering prosperity of contemporary Western Europe to realise just what it was like in the years immediately after the Second World War. In ...”

“... worth fifty million pounds.’ This is Kenwright’s mother. Ferguson can’t quite believe it: David Moyes was giving me the eyes. For a minute I thought it was a get-up, a performance. Bill’s background was in theatre, after all. It occurred to me while all this was going on that I ought to check Wayne’s medical records. Was there something physically ...”

“... director of operations was Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys. Its legal draftsman was Sir David Maxwell Fyfe QC, a right-wing libertarian with potent credentials as a principal prosecutor at Nuremberg. It was Maxwell Fyfe who told a Conservative Party rally in 1948 that just as Nazism had crept first gradually and then irresistibly into German ...”

“... or unconsciously aware of and responsive to? What might be thought to be a modern attitude when held by those at home thinking about family members or fellow citizens risking their lives (and killing others) hundreds or thousands of miles away? What is the balance of anxiety and relief in the minds of those on whose behalf distant wars are ostensibly being ...”

“... not the central figure, whether or not he has been hit by ” an arrow. This view was dismissed by David Wilson in his superb colour facsimile of 1985. It turns out, however, that the scene as we know it is the result of a restoration in the earlier 19th century. The areas in which work was done included, crucially, the flights on the end of the missile in or ...”

“... big man. Once one recognises what he is up to, all the paradoxes of his character fall into place. David Willey has written a fascinating book, and has done so from the point of view of an agonised catholic liberal. ‘My faith in God is intact,’ he tells his readers by way of preface, ‘but my allegiance to the Roman Church has been suspended while I ...”

“... seat of government in the Piazza della Signoria, he stopped in front of Michelangelo’s 15-foot David. He didn’t see in it a symbol of the Florentine nation or even identify the figure. For the abbé, it was ‘a great phantasm of white marble, well worked and all of one piece’ (‘ung grand fantosme de marbre blanc, bien ouvre et tout dune ...”

“... death, some humorous, some grimly foreboding. In November 1982 he wrote to Motion about a dinner held for Thatcher by the historian Hugh Thomas and attended by writers he thought she might admire (Larkin, Isaiah Berlin, V.S. Pritchett, Mario Vargas Llosa and Anthony Powell, among others), which Larkin had found tough going. ‘The Thatcher dinner was pretty ...”

“... of it. If so, the idea proved to be inseparable from the content and drama of a programme that held the entire audience in its thrall for nearly two hours, without pauses or interval. No words were spoken other than those of the narrator in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, and no homilies delivered other than a programme insert bearing excerpts from ...”

“... front the horizontal bands in the beard rhyme with the interlaced fingers of the clasped hands, held away from the body to form a shape in space that seems charged with a mysterious spiritual force. There is an overflow from this room into the Egyptian room which follows – notably a case with Babylonian objects of the second millennium BC that includes a ...”

“... home from the theatre and instantly became the centre of attention’. The gorgeous past is held in the nostrils, and it was not long before Michael could recognise Uncle Alex’s Montechristo cigars. The most flamboyant impresario that the British picture industry had known, Alex was the only man who had ever conquered the American market (with Henry ...”