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“... more palatable than the real one is invented, telling how the companion child escaped over the wall. Thanks to that, and the fact that a Communist novelist wants to make a film about how a ‘child of the people’ was mutilated by corrupt aristocrats, we acquire – obliquely – an answer to the question which those opening pages has left us with. Are ...”

“... A cluster of lights shone out of the dark, as cold and distant as a galaxy. Then it was gone.’ Stephen Dedalus has been repeatedly alluded to, and Atlas leaves us wondering whether his Icarus soars, plunges, or merely dangles after the fashion of his favourite novelist’s favourite man. The last, I guess. The form of The Great Pretender is Portnoyesque ...”

“... Catholics ‘and foreigners’. She could see trouble returning. ‘When your back is against the wall,’ she said and paused. The unspoken words were ‘you fight.’ I asked her what she thought should be done. ‘Oh, I’m not the brains behind this,’ she said. ‘But I tell you one thing. They got rid of Billy Wright. That was a big mistake.’Wright ...”

“... thinking and smiling about being pregnant. And so it should surprise no one that the journalist Stephen Bayley, in the Independent, has compared Moss to Mona Lisa: just as that painting – so claims the novelist Dan Brown, incorrectly – is an ‘androgynous’ self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, Moss’s ‘gamine look’ has a similar ‘sexual ...”

“... in a watered-down form, is currently so popular with wealthy white men in Silicon Valley or Wall Street; Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman’s The Daily Stoic (2016), for example, has been a bestseller in the Business Motivation, Success Self-Help and Greek and Roman Philosophy categories. How useful is ...”

“... standing on a site where enslaved people were warehoused,’ reads the sign stencilled on a brick wall as you enter the museum. The first exhibit is a holographic slave, about to be auctioned, who speaks to visitors from a small underground cage. In the final exhibit holographic prisoners in orange jumpsuits sit behind protective glass. The museum traces the ...”

“... a wide range of artists and writers, including the charismatic sculptor and Bloomsbury habitué Stephen Tomlin, and the novelist David Garnett, whose publishing connections were to prove invaluable. Now in her late twenties, Warner was hungry for new experiences. In July 1922, while she was browsing in the cheap section of Whiteley’s Department Store in ...”

“... congruent, whether you draw them from Clark Clifford’s memoirs, Seymour Hersh’s critique, Stephen Ambrose’s judicious biography of Nixon or the recollections of Averell Harriman, Richard Holbrooke or Daniel Davidson. Mr Isaacson has added some extra but exiguous detail to the story. By shopping on both sides of the street, and betraying the side he ...”

“... persuasion strikes even closer than words to the core of our being,’ the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once said. Scientists use pictures more than most academics, but ‘somewhere along the way’, he cautioned, they have lost the sense that it’s wrong to identify pictures with the realities they represent. We say that we ‘see’ a four-week ...”

“... of no use because by merely throwing a sponge soaked in a variety of colours at a wall there would be left on the wall a stain in which could be seen a beautiful landscape ... And the painter in question makes very sorry landscapes.’ Primavera’a glowing oranges and colourful Tuscan spring flowers demand ...”

“... let alone even the most influential works of criticism. As the founding father of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt made his professional reputation with Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); but it was Will in the World (2004), his biographical account of ‘How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare’ that won him a huge advance. The established facts of ...”

“... experience, rendered possible by teamwork on the part of Science, Art and Labour. According to Stephen Haliday’s The Great Stink of London, published earlier this year, 827,000 persons used the water closets installed for the Great Exhibition, ‘many visitors no doubt experiencing the device for the first time’. How and why the authorities counted ...”

“... income tax or the levy on land values advocated by the Webbs and others, the writing was on the wall for their autonomy. Describing the British system of government to Germans in 1903, Josef Redlich was amazed that central and local authorities were equal before the law. The corollary, of course, was an absence of constitutional safeguard, as Davis’s ...”

“... narrative. Drawing on elements as disparate as Alexander Afanasev’s Russian Fairy Tales and Stephen Hecht’s scholarly paper ‘Tobacco Carcinogens, Their Biomarkers and Tobacco-Induced Cancer’, Red Plenty is a seamless pastiche. It takes the long view of Soviet history, although Spufford’s view is highly selective. Sputniks and cosmonauts go ...”

“... It was important to mix up the pages and magazines, so that page 20 might be high in a north wall and 21 on the bottom of the south wall. I believe this was my first lesson in literature, in the infinite possibilities of creativity. What I knew for sure was that his walls were a great idea. He would have read through ...”