“... enemies include Gail Wynand, a newspaper mogul who likes to buy up writers and corrupt them; Peter Keating, a charming rival damned by too-easy success; Ellis Toohey, an indescribably evil left-wing journalist and intellectual, based, it is said, on Harold Laski and Lewis Mumford. Another antagonist is Dominique Francon, the ...”

“... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...”

“... is even better. Lea as ley, it always had that feel. A route out. A river track that walked the walker, a wet road. The Lea fed our Hackney dreaming: a water margin. On any morning when the city was squeezing too hard, you could get your hit of rus in urbe. Hackney Marshes giving way to the woodyards of Lea Bridge Road, to Springfield Park; reservoir ...”

“... his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school’. However, as Peter Campbell wrote in the LRB (3 February 2011), English painters ‘responded to Impressionism’s escape from the academic into the everyday, but made something tighter and darker of it. The French pleasure in picnics and river parties and weather wasn’t ...”

“... other. Sicilia ‘is his situation’, and his situation is that of a man who, like a high-wire-walker looking down, senses a ‘Nothing’ in love: who shakes hands, as over a Vast; and embraces as it were from the ends of opposed Winds.Like Shylock and Malvolio and perhaps Angelo, Leontes is a man who cannot play. He is invested with a form of helpless ...”

“... true, when so much else has changed? To the traveller passing at speed, even to the hiker or dog-walker, farmed fields are anonymous elements that contribute to a pattern. It’s the landscape the eye seeks, not any of the fields making it up. Most fields have no individuality to a stranger; at best, a fine oak in the middle, or a pretty horse grazing. Few ...”

“... alongside the new site, were required as parking space for the 2012 green Olympics. Johnnie Walker, chairman of the Hackney and Leyton Sunday Football League, was enraged: despite assurances from a multitude of faceless authorities that work would not begin for four years, the diggers arrived before the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled ...”

“... tolerable in recollection, or in art.One day​ he set out on a walk from the town (he was a good walker), made his way up the hill and along the Poole Road and eventually arrived at the villa at 63 Alum Chine Road, where he rang the bell. Valentine Roch, the Stevensons’ servant, mistook him for a carpet dealer who had let them down. First she kept him in ...”