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“... But one group, about midnight, dress up – half in black clothes, with blackened faces, half in white with whitened faces – and go off into the dark ... Here certainly is ritual, with no allegory about it. But whose ritual? And whence the coloured faces? The first editor had no doubt. The human sacrifice brings initiation in the Mysteries; we hear of this ...”

“... his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him, and his course towards us was marked by a white foam a rod in width, which he made with the continual violent thrashing of his tail; his head was about half out of water, and in that way he came upon, and again struck the ship. This time the bow was stove in, and the whale, pumping its tail in a froth ...”

“... On the front cover of The Battle for Bermondsey there is a photograph of Peter Tatchell as, I imagine, he would like to be seen: a steady innocent gaze, a determined tilt to the chin, a youthful crusading air. He looks fragile but brave. In the background, slightly out of focus, is an older comrade looking decidedly askance, not to say horrified ...”

“... its line, finishing rightwards of where it began; saw that his side-whiskers were so spare that white skin showed through. His father was not old, Bill remembered, as he registered also the slenderness hugged by his shirt, the spread of his thighs on the seat, even the flex of his finger as it drummed on the upper part of his arm. He had been barely 19 when ...”

“... shadowy backgrounds, hands clutched to throats, legs tottering beneath spindly trunks, follicles white with the ‘horror of life’. In fact, this was often how they saw themselves. Disease may be the great leveller, the only effective manifestation of the democratic spirit, but for these men it often became a sign of grace and unique destiny. The 19th ...”

“... forward-leaning man with his back to you draw you into an imagined space, your eye turns to the white tablecloth which their gestures seem to measure and enclose. You now have a quite different picture to attend to – a still life of food. There is bread, a basket of fruit, a roast fowl, a glass of wine, a jug and a carafe. In the later painting, Christ is ...”

“... forty-year-old often skint but always cadging mother, Helen. Other characters were added later. Peter, the louche businessman with a ‘wallet full of reasons’ to lure Helen offstage and into a brief marriage for the play’s middle sections. Jimmie, the charming ‘coloured naval rating’ who keeps Jo company over Christmas and leaves her pregnant. And ...”

“... off, and mixed bold and light, serifed and sans serif characters in single words. He left a lot of white space, words often ran up or down the page, and big type was often mixed with very small photographs. These devices slowed readers down. Readers who persevered became initiates. His layouts were a rejection of the conservative traditions which still govern ...”

“... The Austrian writer Peter Handke is so successful and so prolific that, reviewing one of his recent novels, his arch-enemy Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ended by crowing at the fact that Langsame Heimkehr bad failed to make it onto the best-seller list. ‘Let no one say there’s no such thing as progress,’ he concluded ...”

“... us no comment of his own on the story he has to tell – just the facts: no speculation as to why Peter Sutcliffe behaved as he did, just the events, the family life, anecdotes that may or may not be pertinent, the pubs and their atmosphere. And we go back, or rather from the beginning of the book we go forward – from Sutcliffe’s grandparents on both ...”

“... Standard. ‘Sir Richard Hopkins was warned and the “Treasury view” no longer appeared in the White Paper as fundamental and decisive, taken by itself, as Winston Churchill had made it appear in his Budget statement.’ Instead, the objections were dressed up in a great deal of administrative detail, designed to deflect attention from the central ...”

“... of composition, figures and faces (or parts of them) appear in these borderlands. In The White Tablecloth (1926) a scrap of grey profile; in Dining Room overlooking the Garden (1930-31) three-quarters only of Marthe’s face is made even harder to register by the trellis pattern of the wallpaper. Cut-off figures (Bonnard’s way of doing them is much ...”

“... This theory later became the central slogan of the Thatcher-Reagan reaction of the Eighties. Peter Taylor’s marvellous book does awful damage to it. He deals with the power of the tobacco companies, especially the six giant ones which control the production, distribution and marketing of the crop all over the world. Tobacco has been around for some ...”

“... sentences: While Frederika dozed, Blaise went into the men’s section of the pool house, where Peter had observed his sister, Enid, being made love to by Clay Overbury, now her husband, as well as aide to Senator James Burden Day, whose daughter, Diana, was becoming, more and more, the center of Peter’s ...”

“... was six but I thought I knew what she meant. I had these friends, the Routledge twins: Andrew and Peter. My own two Christian names, as it happened, but divided up like that I didn’t recognise them as mine. Andrew was quiet and cautious, Peter quick and reckless. They lived on a mucky farm nearby; you turned out of the ...”