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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and intersecting links and keys chained together’. The barometer hanging on the dining-room wall of the Welty house also deserves mention, because, thanks to her self-described ‘strong meteorological sensitivity’, storms, floods, high winds and heat precipitate or complement the action in many of her stories. So does the camera. It taught her to ...”

“... and his little brother, Allen, head of the CIA. Both were former legal advisers to United Fruit. Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger’s classic history of the coup, Bitter Fruit (1982), showed that many of the players behind it were either United Fruit stockholders, or angling for a seat on the company board, or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... friends and ‘disciples’. On another occasion, he compared himself to Leopold Bloom and me to Stephen Dedalus, adding, ‘Every writer needs a guide, a father-figure.’ On one level, he was a father to me, and on another level, a friend. For, behind the big talk about literature, a fondness had grown between us, based on the ardent exchange of ideas that ...”

“... accept ‘Jewish colonisation’: it had either to stop or to proceed ‘behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach’. But there were other paradoxes. He said that he had no wish to oppress the Arabs, still less to ‘transfer’ or expel them, and he may have meant it. And yet not only did he insist that a Jewish majority ...”

“... to the wannabe suburb of Stamford Hill. Hoxton and Shoreditch were on the wrong side of the Roman wall, a dog-end territory of street markets and unlicensed boxers. The 1990s had seen the area – birthplace of Lenny ‘The Guv’nor’ McLean, the Kray Twins et al – mutate from a criminous warren, twinned with the Jago, to a user-friendly film ...”