“... of lame ducks. Sandy, his schizophrenic nephew; Patsy Healey, who had acted in his short film The White Bus and been depressed ever since. There was his mother and, for a while, his brother’s wife, and he was always on call to counsel and very often to subsidise needy friends and actors who had lost their way. I have had some credit because I gave room in ...”

“... history,’ Stewart muses. He wanders into Amara’s World War One cemetery, where a grid of white crosses and an Indo-Muslim dome sit alongside a rice paddy. His distant predecessor St John Philby (father of Kim), who acted as political officer in Amara ninety years ago, still enjoys a local reputation. Another sheikh fondly remembers one ‘Mr ...”

“... creole families of colonial Venezuela, the familias mantuanas as they were known (from the long white mantua or gown worn by the women), he was one of the privileged few who could afford to travel in Europe as a young man. In Paris in 1804, he was dazzled by the spectacle of Napoleon’s coronation and yearned for similar personal glory. An eccentric ...”

“... In​ 1955, William Strath was asked to produce a report for the government on the possible impact of nuclear conflict on the UK. Strath, a former tax inspector, economic planner and experienced civil servant, came to the conclusion that Britain was unlikely to emerge from a nuclear attack as a functioning society, never mind as a nation able to wage war ...”

“... with garden peas (Pisum sativum): round or wrinkled seeds; yellow or green seed colour; purple or white flowers. Taking great care to keep his self-fertilising stock as pure as possible, so he could be confident that, for example, the green-seeded peas reliably produced only green seeds and yellow-seeded ones only yellow, he proceeded to hybridise them and ...”

“... writers whose style she admired. She also championed Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams. She did some work for Italian radio and wrote a few prefaces, mostly for works by religious figures.One such preface, to a 1966 edition of Weil’s Waiting for God, caused an uproar. Although Campo had long been an admirer of Weil, her ...”

“... but cappuccino and croissants smell better than diesel fumes, and polished terrazzo flooring and white-enamelled steel have more appeal than sooty brick and the brownish, magnetised dust from cast-iron brake blocks that formerly clung to every metal surface. After all, railways never set out to be ‘atmospheric’, but to perform a valuable and profitable ...”

“... in a prose that looked decidedly non-experimental – pure, classical, like something carved from white marble.’ Even so, a host of critics (mostly male) simply missed the point. Among other things, the decidedly odd and unsexy ‘Miss Cather’ was deemed to be insufficiently engaged with Big Social Issues. During the Depression she came under violent ...”

“... a fugitive from America since being prosecuted under the Mann Act for his liaison with a teenage white girl. Cravan said of him: ‘After Poe, Whitman and Emerson he is the greatest glory of America.’ There was a background of artistic interest in boxing at this time, but although Braque and Picasso made drawings of black boxers they never went as far as ...”

“... self-consuming hellishness. Sir Walter goes on for ever reading his own life in the Baronetage; William Walter Elliot is for ever defined as bad by the simple statement that too many people like him – he lives as social image. Like Henry James’s Madame Merle, he is the great round world in person. And that remarkable fragment Sanditon perhaps takes this ...”

“... nation to have vindicated the higher principles of humanity.’ The Leader of the Opposition, William Gladstone, seconding Disraeli’s vote of thanks to the troops who had pulled off this masterly campaign, could only acquiesce. Unfortunately, however, Disraeli meant by the purity of his purpose precisely the opposite of the course the Guardian was ...”

“... female accomplice just about to dive, far out at sea, into the jaws of a helpful shark, the white-faced red-clad woman looking ‘like what came aboard the ship to shoot dice in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The extreme diffusion of the Ancient Mariner in modern culture helps to show how very odd a classic Coleridge’s poem is: we tend not to be ...”

“... Diplomats from George Kennan to Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union) and William Burns (later head of the CIA under Biden) all warned against extending Nato eastwards. They predicted that the siting of potential adversaries – perhaps eventually nuclear-armed ones – along its border would exacerbate Russia’s fears of encirclement ...”

“... that I saw him in grainy photos posted by ex-pupils on Friends Reunited. Was he not the boy in the white shirt at the edge of a photograph taken in front of the school in 1980, with kids tumbling over each other and somebody spraying from a shook-up can?He tended to do well in class but on a report card for July 1978 you can see things were changing. His ...”

“... Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched and hyperextended with hooks and rings and belts and dumb-bells: Acker was lifting weights long before lifting ...”