“... really only tests his characters’ marriage with conundrums. When it looks like Katie’s lover, Stephen, might start causing some serious trouble, he is politely asked to leave – and he does. The beauty of Simon Armitage’s new novel is that it’s prepared to face up to things. But then of course Armitage has the great advantage of coming from West ...”

“... learning that his doctor was coming through the next room, and turning his body violently to the wall to exclaim in exasperation and despair: ‘Oh, that ass!’ Beethoven came to rely heavily on young Gerhard, whom he variously called ‘Hosenknopf’ (‘trouser button’), because he stuck so closely to his father, and Ariel; and not merely for running ...”

“... they were essentially the same thing (‘Does this mean the return of the biographical subject?’ Stephen Bann disingenuously asks in his Introduction), as if writing were just a feeble disguise for lived experience. Proust evokes the death of a grandmother, but we all know he means his mother. The objection to this kind of stuff is not that we want to deny ...”

“... pressing in on the place of reprieve. But it would be foolish to claim this happened very often. Stephen Coppel, the British Museum’s curator, has included here and there among the Vollard plates things from the museum’s collection that might help us take the measure of Picasso’s borrowing. There is a massive head of Hercules, a Greek vase featuring a ...”

“... markets have brought to a close the ‘century of labour’ (1875-1975) and corroborated the Wall Street reading of the Manifesto: capitalism has now become truly inexorable, having overcome all the obstacles in its path, including the working-class militancy and solidarity on which Marx naively relied. Whatever the merit of this diagnosis, the Manifesto ...”

“... must have seemed bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight.10 February. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he’d been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children’s cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmons animated film about a pig ...”

“... Piper makes us more directly aware of a great architectural tradition burning up,’ Stephen Spender said. Piper – always, temperamentally, happy to comply – went on tour around the country to document burned-out churches as well as picturesque buildings deemed to be under threat, including Windsor Castle, producing a series of dark ...”

“... and Restoring the State. Sanogo described Mali’s democratic edifice under Touré as a sagging wall that he and his men would knock down and rebuild. The coup had not derailed Mali’s democracy, he claimed, but had been necessary to save it. ‘When at a high level of state responsibility,’ he said in a televised interview in May, ‘you allow yourself ...”

“... they denied the existence of adverse realities.’ (The character thinks this while watching a Wall Street bigshot, sent over by the State Department, lecture the guerrilla leadership on ‘the importance of strong ratings from Moody’s bond-risk service’.) Most of the stories arrive at dramatic endings but, thanks to deftly administered ironic ...”

“... to crunch any passing prey. There used to be tales of passengers pursued and pinned to the wall by grand pianos. Aboard Europa I was at a cinema matinée when the floor began to tilt, the statuary to quiver and the faces on the screen to go in and out of focus. Then came the thuds as unseated passengers hit the deck and tried not to roll in the ...”

“... satire, pleasing the general public as well as the 1890s avant-garde. Oscar Wilde put it on his wall (‘Every poet should gaze at the portrait of his queen’) and when Nicholson modestly responded to praise from Whistler by remarking that the queen was a wonderful subject, Whistler replied: ‘Her Majesty might well say the same of ...”

“... his own characteristic way a great man. His son acknowledged this in the wry admiration with which Stephen Dedalus, asked by a friend to define him, speaks of his father in A Portrait of the Artist: ‘A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a ...”

“... now and then.’ A couple of closing moves seem straight from the narratology textbooks: the Stephen Hero office clock epiphany, the Lady with Lapdog but-we’re-only-just-beginning ending. A stalled playwright, recently shafted by a Hollywood agent, drops in despair into a Times Square peepshow; he weeps, hopelessly, for his ex-girlfriend, for God, for ...”

“... looking like trains of ants weaving their way into the city. My desk was in a booth by a low wall that separated me from John’s secretary, the formidable RoseMarie Terenzio. John depended on no one more than RoseMarie. ‘Here’s the deal,’ I’d hear her say, before the door to John’s office slammed shut.San Diego or Chicago? That was the ...”

“... antagonists of forty years ago, the police and the press, have fared less well. This side of the Stephen Lawrence case and the phone-hacking trials neither has the same level of credibility they enjoyed in the 1970s.Born in 1934, Lucan would have been, or just possibly was, eighty in 2014. The second child and eldest son of George Charles Patrick ...”