“... another interpretative framework. Everyone from Christian occultists to Expressionists such as Max Beckmann and Otto Dix linked the war to the Apocalypse, either as phantasmagorical metaphor or accurate prediction. Were the British not Israelites fighting Germany’s Assyrians? Surely the Western Front could be seen as Armageddon? ‘Never in the whole ...”

“... himself on his ability to turn out a thousand good words in no time and under pressure: the reason Max Hastings, who followed him as editor of the Telegraph, and his successors always wanted to keep him on as a writer. He can be cutting about journalists whose main ambition is to rise to an executive level where they only boss around those who write – and ...”

“... colour of [human] Nature, which climate, food and customs alter and change into yellow, brown or black.’ The ‘most handsome and best built men’ among the whites were to be found in the most temperate part of Europe, between the fortieth and fiftieth degrees of latitude. By a happy coincidence, Perpignan sits on the 42nd degree of latitude and Dunkirk ...”

“... them by country with a special ‘Borderline’ category within the UK list containing only Max Hastings. Swire is more sweeping in her acknowledgments to ‘all the Cameroons for not mentioning me or barely mentioning me in their memoirs – this is payback!’ But is it? Neither of these dispiriting books makes its author sympathetic. Having at last ...”

“... and the intensity of this viewing-and-reviewing can be a bit wearing. (‘Enough with the blue-black curtain!’ is one of my margin notes in the chapter on still lifes.) Ditto all the rhetorical questions and Socratic teases: ‘Is it the case …’, ‘Can we agree …’ and so on. At the same time If These Apples Should Fall is a very generous ...”

“... had been bedevilled by some 19,000 US Army deserters involved in large-scale robbery and black market dealings in the rear areas.’ One group syphoned off petrol needed for tanks and sold it on the French black market. Whiting’s italics and exclamation-mark seem amply justified when he reports that from February ...”

“... domestic, balancing the psychological grimness of Maigret’s investigations, and the jet-black view of humanity embodied in his discoveries, with the comfort and routine of settled domesticity. A big part of this, perhaps the main part, is Madame Maigret’s amazingly good bourgeois cooking. (There’s no fictional character whose food I would rather ...”

“... The first is Gallery Nine at Burlington House, a square room where superb Frank Steallas of his black period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would ...”

“... the poems sold well. Early photographs show a delicate, intense, ephebic young man with a shock of black curls; the journalist Edoardo Scarfoglio, who knew him in Rome in the early 1880s, said he had the look of a ‘timid, wild girl’. The curls soon disappeared. This loss he attributed to the use of iron perchlorate to treat a scalp wound after a duel, a ...”

“... of Independence had called ‘merciless Indian Savages’. ‘When this is all over,’ Cofer Black, Bush’s chief counterterrorist adviser, assured his boss, ‘the bad guys are going to have flies walking across their eyeballs.’ The mood was infectious among the personnel in charge of exterminating the brutes. The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan ...”

“... for posterity. Typically, the speculation shadows the spirit of the age. In 1904, influenced by Max Nordau’s theories of racial degeneration, A.C. Benson ascribed the pervasive Tennysonian gloom to a strain of ‘dark Southern blood’ tainting the predominantly Scandinavian stock of the family. In 1923, Harold Nicolson, persuaded by Strachey’s sardonic ...”

“... in courtrooms: a claim proved to be false within a matter of days. There was also a certain black comedy in the fact that the girl who had lied about being a lawyer should be attacked two days later, in the same papers, by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard professor of law, who happened to be visiting Australia. I met Jill Kitson on the morning his article ...”

“... and stamping on licentious tarantulas hidden up petticoats. The performance was accessorised with black lace mantilla, castanets and theatrical displays of haughtiness or languor. It had little to do with prevailing French-Italian styles and certainly surprised the habitués of the London theatre. Planted supporters got the applause going, but even as she was ...”

“... routinely castrate ‘Gentiles’ who hang around their women). Enter a lone rider, dressed in black, packing two black Colt pistols by his side. His name is ‘Lassiter’. The stranger faces down Tull and his men and rescues Bern Venters from the Mormon lash. With Lassiter an archetype was born: the lone-wolf cowboy ...”

“... outside the old Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street, walking down to the entrance of the big black palace, taking the lift up to the second floor, and bursting into the editor’s office just as the morning conference was about to begin. After explaining the circumstances to the astonished assembly, I intended to invite the editor to move over, plonk ...”