“... I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bullfighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bullfights would be good, and that ...”

“... used to live in Londonderry. If instead of meeting my dad at a dance in Dublin, she had met a young butcher called Martin from the Bogside, maybe I would be Martin Jr. There was an Oedipal twist to my unlikely fantasy, because I also used to imagine killing him. And it wasn’t just me. At lunch in the school canteen, between telling stories about ...”

“... appeared confused, irritated or bored by him, classic reactions of age to the heroes of youth. Robert Carringer’s sharp-eyed, dispassionate post-mortem on what actually happened in the making of Kane, and Barbara Leaming’s almost embarrassingly intimate monitoring of the variations in the maker’s oft-told tales during what turned out to be the last ...”

“... economically in the words ‘uncouth of speech’. The relentlessly reader-friendly translation by Robert Fitzgerald departs from the usual reading to say the Carians were led by their chief ‘in their own tongue’. Robert Fagles, whose version aims at an idiomatic directness lacking in Lattimore, without the sacrifice of ...”

“... out of the flesh of the prose as carefully as a piece of glass from a wound. What exactly does the young heroine of A World of Love have in mind when she reflects on her mistrust of ‘the past’s activity and its queeringness’? We could describe these idiosyncrasies as ‘modernist’: an authorial signature or calling card. But their real interest lies in ...”

“... Boydell launched his Shakespeare Gallery, commissioning artists to paint scenes from the plays; Robert Bowyer opened a gallery of paintings illustrating scenes from Hume’s History of England. These and other such ventures were to be funded both by exhibiting the paintings themselves and engraving them for sale, whether as prints to be framed or as book ...”

“... of syntax and the personification of abstract ideas (another of Wordsworth’s special hates). Robert Mack, properly enough, sets out to be Gray’s advocate and though not all his vindications of individual poems are persuasive, his biography does add an important consideration to our understanding of Gray’s poetic values, and therefore of his high ...”

“... two women to be admitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the Rising was suppressed, Robert, her father, narrowly escaped the firing squad, and was in Lewes Prison when Maeve was born. Her childhood was punctuated by raids from ‘unfriendly men dressed in civilian clothes carrying revolvers’; they were looking for her father, who was often on ...”

“... create a savage divorce between fact and feeling. One is reminded of Monet, at the deathbed of his young wife, irresistibly noting her skin colour – and horrified at the artist in him. In Chatwin, the unsparing clarity of vision and his feeling for the cruel and ambivalent were all of a piece. His prose walked a knife-edge. He respected the primitive – but ...”

“... a point. For instance, she privately draws doom-ridden conclusions from her supposed descent from Robert FitzRoy, who committed suicide, like his uncle Castlereagh, and like her father, who wasn’t married to her mother, but left her his name – which he didn’t spell in the supposedly ancestral fashion with a capital in the middle. That spelling Charlotte ...”

“... these generalities. It includes Classical buildings – Quinlan Terry’s Richmond scheme and Robert Adam’s computer centre at Dogmersfield Park in Hampshire – as well as jokier numbers – Terry Farrell’s boathouse at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s ...”

“... in’ that day, so it was no big surprise when I was greeted at the terminal by an eager-eyed young pressman. He grabbed my suitcase with one hand and my elbow with the other and guided me off to the Press Room. Therein, dead-centre, was a small stage flooded with television lights, and on the stage a couple of black leatherette TV armchairs. An airport ...”

“... in the Lords and bask, as perhaps we shouldn’t, in the praise we get afterwards. If we meet young people, we invariably find them of real interest – they tend to be bright and good-looking and to bode well for the future. If we are able to separate ourselves from our guide (and it isn’t easy to walk out on him, it must be said), we will usually ...”

“... finds him in Operational Research for the Air Force. He comes out of this experience an angry young man, shocked by the waste of lives in what he sees as senseless bombing of cities, and equally by official obtuseness in failing to accept measures that could have reduced the casualty rate among air crews. This chapter is followed by one about Frank ...”

“... for touch-me-not persons. Diana-Titania falls helplessly in love with a comic version of the very young man whom she had cruelly enchanted with the stag’s head and horns. Bully Bottom, monster of the comic baroque, becomes the creature she dotes upon. Thus the baroque acts both to fantasise the personal and explore, in the most searchingly realistic ...”