“... Mr Gandhi, I won’t have any attacks on my Empire’ and he seems to have left no lasting mark on foreign policy; Of all his prime ministers, he liked MacDonald the best, which hardly inspires confidence in his political judgment. Most politicians, in fact, found George V very difficult to deal with. His obsessions with the trivia of courtly life ...”

“... any other artist.’ And Julian Schnabel says: ‘Looking at Pollock’s paintings we think about mark making and energy and some kind of transference from the rhythm of the world to the gesture of your body, and how to capture something that is expressive and simultaneously seems like it’s not composed.’ Surely those remarks embody what really matters in ...”

“... independence and British devolution.At the heart of Bucknell’s book is an examination of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), which Ezra Pound denounced three-quarters of a century later as a ‘stinking sugar teat’, but which sold very well from the outset and, as Bucknell points ...”

“... skewed, like some sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards ...”

“... its stripped-down passion reflects the twinship Paul now feels with John, Munch and even Mark Rothko.Since the death of her mother and husband, Paul’s palette has lightened and her pigments thinned to layered veils of colour, now and then stippled to give texture to foam or foliage. She sometimes seems to be using oils like watercolour, and she ...”

“... on Market, dykes on bikes, Kim Novak’s white coat in Vertigo, dry martinis at the Top of the Mark: did I even live in a real place? As card-carrying cynic and naysayer, I wasn’t exactly diffusing tears of joy in all directions. Some of the diffidence I felt no doubt had to do with the fact that Blakey and I had already been living together ...”

“... latter sense is at the centre of the tradition of English romantic painting, from Blake through Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites to Sickert: certainly it was Nash’s tradition. When the war began, Nash enlisted at once, and after training and a commission he was sent to the Front, saw action in the Ypres salient, was injured in a trench accident, and ...”

“... was born 30 November 1908, third child and second son of Henry Brooke and his wife Mary, née Turner, the youngest of the family by ten years or more. Both his grandfathers had been wine merchants, also his father, who had started life as a solicitor. Brooke’s elder brother, after ten years as a regular officer in the Royal East Kent Regiment, The ...”

“... which included old friends like Gottlieb and new ones like Marcus Rothkowitz (soon to become Mark Rothko). He came to know William Baziotes and later, through Rothko, Clyfford Still, and then Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt. According to Motherwell, the group opposed art dedicated either to ‘social values’ or to formalist ...”

“... In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or anally raped or has his or her feet eaten off by rats, the pain of this (I nearly wrote the discomfort) must transcend anything else that happens on the stage. A ...”

“... material’, as scripts were called at the studio, were passed to his friend, the director Mark Rydell, who was so smooth Gucci wore his shoes. (‘I love what you do’ were his first words.) There were more trips, more late-night calls from the producer, more huddles, more oleaginous words, more rewrites. On the basis of the Pollack draft the film ...”

“... of the Town’ department, composing reportorial vignettes and musings that helped make his mark even though ‘Talk’ stories were then unsigned. Individual voices such as Updike’s – and, later, Jamaica Kincaid’s and George W.S. Trow’s – managed to peep up despite the magazine’s horse collar of wry urbanity. A volume of Updike’s Talk ...”

“... after his own visit, ‘for illness has neither tamed his mind, nor aged his body. It has left its mark, however, in the pallor of his long oval face, with its wide-set eyes, straight nose and thin-lipped sensitive mouth, scarcely shaded by a light moustache, the jest and scorn of his more ribald intimates.’ James noted his intensity, his ...”

“... still unaccustomed role of global superpower show a strong family resemblance. ‘History,’ as Mark Twain noted, ‘doesn’t often repeat itself; but it rhymes.’ I first saw Vietnam in November 1966, on assignment from the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times. I arrived in Saigon with a letter from my editor I could easily have written myself, and a hazy idea of ...”

“... not say so. She was wondering if the casserole she had left in the oven would get too dry at Gas Mark 4. Perhaps 3 would have been better. Dry it may well have been but there was no need to have worried. The thieves took the oven and the casserole with it. The Ransomes lived in an Edwardian block of flats the colour of ox-blood not far from Regent’s ...”