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“... of low expectations’. ‘Bush’s conversational storytelling makes for engaging reading,’ Peter Baker writes in the New York Times. ‘It’s folksy, sharply observed and surprisingly affecting,’ Michiko Kakutani says in the same paper. ‘A helluva good read,’ Douglas Brinkley writes in the Financial ...”

“... for the tardiness of my payments, I should explain myself in writing, and this letter would be read out in my defence at the hearing. This was how I found myself about three weeks later, sitting at an unnatural table – that caramel-municipal sheen found in so many offices – opposite four men in suits, one of whom was reading out my letter. It explained ...”

“... apply as well to Helfgott’s more obvious precursor – the Mozart (both pianist and composer) Peter Schaffer presented in Amadeus (1979). His first words, addressed to Constanze, were even cattier than Helfgott’s: ‘Miaouw! I’m going to pounce-bounce! I’m going to scrunch-munch! I’m going to chew-poo my little mouse-wouse!’ The Shine screenplay ...”

“... that the submarine was accidentally hit by a smart torpedo fired during a naval exercise by Peter the Great, the Russian warship that was also the first vessel to reach the Kursk’s last reported position. The article was incendiary enough to elicit immediate denials from the Navy, the FSB – Russia’s FBI – and Igor Klebanov, the Deputy Prime ...”

“... and Redon which show how the personality Delacroix projected – isolated, self-absorbed – was read by a younger generation of painters. Degas remembered seeing him, walking with his collar turned up and a scarf around his neck, ‘rapidly crossing the street, and stepping up on the other pavement, still going fast’. The memory stuck in his ...”

“... lost my virginity. I rolled my own cigarettes, was a member of Amnesty International and had just read Kerouac’s Desolation Angels. In short, I was eminently suitable for the job. At the time, there was a shortage of lighthouse keepers. This was not because the lights were being automated – that would come later – but because most of the men who would ...”

“... one of London’s lost rivers.) The trays, with the help of the barcodes on their sides, which are read as they pass up through the building, are sped to your reading room. There, sitting in your handsome chair in front of your leather-topped reading desk, you watch for a light to come on in the panel in front of you – the light stands alongside the plug for ...”

“... Wesley, is either the leader or the target of what may or may not be a cult, depending on how you read things. He sleeps rough, eats gulls, makes his own shaving foam, and is pursued by between two and a dozen stalkers, whom he calls the Behindlings. They are people whose lives Wesley has rearranged, whose partners he has slept with, whose children have died ...”

“... of Arabia where a mirage shimmers on the horizon and sways towards the watcher in the stalls to be read in due course as a man mounted on a camel. The sisters in Jane Austen’s novel perceive a single rider, whom they eventually distinguish ‘to be a gentleman’: but this, too, could be called a mirage. The occasion is almost over by the time we are able to ...”

“... she is in London. There are phone calls about a reconciliation. Later what we have been reading is read by Jake. In the last section the themes are so interwoven that ‘when?’ and ‘where?’ must be inferred circumstantially. The conflict between storytelling and true description, making sense of life (which is like a story) or making life into a story so ...”

“... nothing in the exhibition relating to an important commission). It makes it unusually rewarding to read right through.* The recognised corpus of Michelangelo drawings is bigger than it once was. Scholars are now more willing to allow that Michelangelo – ‘divine’ in his lifetime – was as uneven as a broader view of what is authentic suggests, and that ...”

“... crossed, eyes not meeting yours (hers), a strong crease created between frowning eyebrows: you read a troubled man who could also be trouble. Alice Neel, ‘Hartley’ (1966) There is no easy way of knowing how true such readings are; but the best of her portraits share with few others (Goya’s Don Andréas del Peral in the National Gallery is ...”

“... spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green ...”

“... There was little to suggest, twenty-odd years ago, that Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe would develop as they have, except Reginald Hill’s unusual and wise decision never to write consecutive novels about them.* Their debut in A Clubbable Woman (1970) came eight years after Julian Symons had first pronounced the ‘detective story’ dead; as late as 1989 T ...”

“... later from a New York law practice. Then he took to writing his memoirs. On Christmas morning I read 78 pages he sent to the Atlantic Monthly. The rejection note has been lost. Christian’s grandfather Rauch fled the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin for Denmark, a refugee of the Napoleonic Wars. He had a farm in Jutland and died in 1809. Of his two ...”