“... behind the whole book in many ways – are a few sentences from a speech which the historical Charles Lindbergh gave to an America First Committee rally in 1941, offering his reasons for opposing those groups (‘the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration’) who were in favour of joining the European war. Lindbergh, not incidentally, had ...”

“... without remembering that all the work in this particular show was purchased or commissioned by Charles Saatchi. No doubt he will be pleased to be compared with Isabella d’Este. If there is a serious theme running through these essays, it concerns the nature of the ‘modern’ and the ‘new’ as governing principles of 20th-century art. The underlying ...”

“... 18th. In Constable’s picture firelight from a Gypsy encampment reddens the tree trunks in the wood to the right of the canvas. It is a miniature scene within a scene conceived with a knowledge of Wright of Derby’s popular night pieces, The Blacksmiths’ Shops and An Iron Forge. The scenic possibilities of industrialisation, the blazing furnaces and ...”

“... At around 9 p.m. on 9 December 1992 Nigel Bartlett was walking down a quiet suburban street near Wood Green in North London when a man began to follow him. The man – Bartlett said he looked ‘like the Michelin man’ – started walking backwards in front of him and asked him if he was the devil, and then if he was happy ...”

“... sexual profligacy and to speculation on the railways). The story is based on a true case, that of Charles Warde, and incorporates documentary passages from legal proceedings and newspapers: but its historical veracity is absolutely of no importance. What matters is the rhetorical twist which Sprott gives to the events, the modern standpoint from which he ...”

“... to ensure accuracy, he treated the images cavalierly: they were flipped, cropped, tweaked. The wood-engravings were not reproduced photomechanically from the original photos, but copied freehand. Darwin’s notes to the engraver survive: ‘omit galvanic instruments and hands’, ‘remove poodle and chair’. The mad lady with the exploding hair is given ...”

“... Philip II had a marvel built: a clockwork automaton of Diego sixteen inches tall and crafted from wood and iron. When stood on a table and activated by a hidden switch under its robes, the mechanical monk walked in circuits, lifting a wooden cross in one hand while the other beat its chest in a mea culpa, the mouth opening and closing in silent prayer. A ...”

“... that in Scotland is traditionally called a ‘graip’ and resembles the pitchfork in Grant Wood’s American Gothic. I prefer to work in darkness: there are fewer questions that way. One weekend afternoon when I was straining with 100 kg of kelp along the promenade, someone stopped to ask: ‘Are you gonnae eat that?’ The ingredients of compost are ...”

“... Pass. He used both of them, but not at the same time. A few hundred yards short of the Abbey Wood terminal, where nobody wanted to go, the train made its traditional unexplained halt. It seems that another train was hogging the station. We waited. I relished the hum of mildly violated silence, of stalled construction, and the cool shadows creeping across ...”

“... strode into the Senate chamber shortly after the daily session had ended. Two days earlier, Charles Sumner, the Senate’s most outspoken critic of slavery, had delivered a five-hour speech, ‘The Crime against Kansas’. Sumner not only denounced the ‘rape’ of Kansas by pro-slavery forces, which had terrorised Northern settlers and sacked the town ...”

“... or false?” has never occurred to him’); a haunting, repeated definition of Hell borrowed from Charles Williams (‘nobody is ever sent to hell; he, or she, insists on going there’). There is a letter to the Sunday Times correcting the suggestion that Auden had snubbed Guy Burgess when he was in disgrace. It was true, Auden said, that he had been out ...”

“... is offering here – in the previous volume his narrator has presented Cottard as an idiot and Charles Swann as the most discreet of men, driven to name-dropping only by his desire to impress the woman he loves and her terrible crowd of friends – he saw something else, and this is what Rose brilliantly sees him seeing:The sentence that blows Genet’s ...”

“... Season (1989), for example, where he plays a South African lawyer with a heavy stylistic debt to Charles Laughton; in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), where he plays an amiable psychologist who gets to dance with Faye Dunaway; in The Score (2001), where he plays the fey and garrulous fence who sets Robert de Niro up with his criminal opportunities. There is ...”

“... the comic implications of the earlier sentence were so beautifully disguised in bumbling. When Charles Stringham, a friend of Jenkins, mentions his time at Oxford, he does so with flamboyant understatement: ‘I explained … that my own college days had been among the most melancholic of a life not untinged by shadow.’ When Jenkins himself offers the ...”