“... cack-handed husband. It has literary pretensions – epigraphs courtesy of Voltaire, W.S. Gilbert and Pirandello – and there are suggestions of a darker, more astringent fable shadowing the good old-fashioned satire of suburban life. When he reveals himself, the real psychopath turns out to have madder and nastier ideas about poison than ...”

“... Cheshire and Scotland, and have other holdings scattered around the world, especially in the old white Dominions. Contemporary estimates of their total wealth start in the region of £100 million, and work steadily – if speculatively – upwards from there. By comparison with many of their landed cousins, who slum it in safari parks, the Westminsters have ...”

“... development, distinguishable only by the ghastly Spinnaker Tower, a signature eyesore of bellying white spars that makes Anish Kapoor’s absurd Olympics evisceration, the ArcelorMittal Orbit, look positively subtle. Oh well, no matter, because unlike the poor blitzed Pompey docks, or Stratford marshes, the power station has oodles of authenticity to ...”

“... of the spirit to the coarseness of a physical touch – an experiment that John Malkovich tried as Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady (1997). Ryan’s monsters are always situated within the bounds of the probable. You can feel the depth of his achievement if you set him alongside two leading actors, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne, who bore a family ...”

“... their French translations. ‘Snotgreen’ = ‘vert-pituite’. He also copied out the so-called Gilbert schema, which lists a governing Homeric parallel, art or science, colour, symbol, bodily organ and rhetorical technique for each of Ulysses’s eighteen episodes, predetermining the way Joyce would approach the narrative. You can sense Queneau’s ...”

“... view of ancient Greek religion as a rather staid, almost statuesque form of cult, with its flowing white robes and strumming lyres. Instead, she exposed beneath the surface a much more violent, ecstatic, even ‘primitive’ (as she saw it) religion, which – she claimed in Themis – was best understood through the lens of Durkheimian anthropology (as she ...”

“... for the authentically progressive – whoever you consider those to be, from Henry Moore to Gilbert and George – in an English art world that remained through the 20th century recalcitrantly retardataire, forever harking back to Victorian escapism and prettiness. On the contrary, goes the other voice, genuine innovation in England was stymied from the ...”

“... next thing he did was strangle him with an old tie (after making sure his dog, Bleep, a black and white mongrel bitch, was out of the way). He washed the body and dusted it with talcum powder, then he went back to bed, where he spent the night with Bleep and the corpse. Here in this cell he is still with me. In fact I believe he is me, or part of me. How can ...”

“... call a ‘bibliography’. They get quite excited: ‘The Pothunters. Ten black-and-white illustrations by R. Noel Pocock ... Soon after I estimated The Pothunters at “up to £100” in Collecting Modern First Editions, an American collector offered me $500 for my own copy ... So what is it worth?’ Bibliophiles are like that, always asking ...”

“... she thought, ‘wouldn’t have stuck through thick and thin to the business of making poems’.Gilbert Sorrentino, writing in the pages of her own magazine, described di Prima as ‘too concerned maybe with not being a “lady writer”’: her work, he said, suffered from a lack of ‘gentleness’. (In ‘The Quarrel’ she tells her man that ‘I ...”

“... My favourite moment in Martin Gilbert’s Life of Churchill is when the Prime Minister is touring the ruins of Hitler’s Chancellery in 1945: In the square in front of the building a crowd of Germans had gathered. Except for one old man who ‘shook his head disapprovingly’, Churchill later recalled, ‘they all began to cheer ...”

“... watching his daughter Flavia beneath a ‘dark and contingent cedar tree … sitting on a white wooden seat, in her unutterable otherness, her pet marmoset on her shoulder, her cap of auburn hair shining like burnished gold on her head. Nearer to the house, in the rose-garden, their younger daughter, seven-year-old Perdita, strange, mysterious and ...”

“... fashion, he attended the ceremony wearing a liqui-liqui (some sort of traditional Colombian white linen suit), with a yellow sunflower in his lapel. In fact, his entourage, all two hundred of them, wore a yellow flower too: in their clothes, in their hair – everywhere. A national emblem perhaps, like the yellow rose of Texas? No, senor. A flowery ...”

“... housewives – anybody with whom they thought they could come to an arrangement. Many married white girls, even though they might already have young brides back home in Mirpur. They drank, ate meat that wasn’t halal, and only rarely went to the East London Mosque on Commercial Road, which had been established in 1941. They were living in that tough but ...”

“... a torrential thunderstorm and forgetting to wipe my feet I trailed wet footsteps all across her white carpet, thus putting paid to any hope of research into the friars, barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of ...”