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“... Piranesi’s ‘Plan of Rome’ (1756) The​ life of a Renaissance antiquarian was far from simple. In April 1436, when Cyriac of Ancona arrived in Athens, he was thrilled by his first sight of the Parthenon, the ‘marvellous marble temple of the goddess Pallas, the divine work of Phidias’. He counted its columns, admired its friezes and commented on the artistry with which Phidias had represented the battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths ...”

“... Martha Gellhorn, the war reporter and writer who feared nothing on earth so much as boredom, and hated the ‘kitchen of life’, was enamoured of a different drudgery – life’s cardboard boxes. She moved house obsessively from continent to continent, America to Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, back and forth: I daren’t venture an exact number of proper residences, but it’s more than a dozen, in almost as many countries ...”

“... Sad things can happen when a writer chooses the wrong subject,’ Wilfrid Sheed once observed. ‘First the writer suffers, then the reader, and finally the publisher, all together in a tiny whirlpool of pain.’ Rick Moody’s The Black Veil is the latest voyage to the bottom of the sink, a journey of self-discovery jinxed by dense fog and treacherous syntax ...”

“... The phrase​ ‘hard-working families’, a staple of New Labour and Conservative rhetoric for about twenty years, fell by the wayside with the political upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer ...”

“... if time travel could eradicate poverty?’ They can also be admonitory: ‘What if a new world on a different planet went wrong in the same way the old world did?’ People who don’t like SF think of it as a genre obsessed with techy-fetishistic questions: ‘What if ...”

“... 1 January 2019, Yorkshire. The New Inn, the village pub, always lays on a quarter of an hour of fireworks at midnight, which we can see if not actually from our bed then certainly from the bedroom window. Brushing my teeth this morning, I catch a glimpse of my New Year self and am depressed to see how depleted I’m looking, though not quite as much as Raymond Briggs, who’s pretty much my age, and a good documentary on whom we watched earlier yesterday evening ...”

“... For as long as my parents still went on holiday together, which ended around my sixth or seventh year, there was nothing unusual in the fact that I should have been sent off with my nanny to stay in what was called a Board Residence in a seaside town on the South Coast ...”

“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has ...”

“... Anthony Trollope once proposed to write ‘a history of English prose fiction’, but ‘broke down in the task, because I could not endure the labour in addition to the other labours of my life’ – for ‘it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels.’ Such a wholesale reading of fiction takes on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect ...”

“... There were paintings of card parties inspired by his youthful canvases, typically featuring a gay pink plume against a buff wall. Even more of them imitated the grimmer scenes he adopted in the second half of his career, in which a scrawny arm and corrugated brow are sharply lit ...”

“... the law politically to discredit those who happen to disagree with it. This has cost the taxpayers a great sum of money, hurt innocent people and undermined public faith in Britain’s institutions. An unfettered press is essential to democracy.’ The Sun asked who would accept blame for spending £50 million (its ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... Vega Gupta’s​ wedding was a four-day, three-million dollar extravaganza held at a five-star hotel in Sun City, South Africa, in May 2013. Two hundred guests arrived from New Delhi on a chartered Airbus that was allowed to land at a nearby military airbase ...”

“... No one should take comfort from the title of Roy Porter’s shaggy masterpiece of a history of medicine. ‘The Greatest Benefit to Mankind’ – the phrase is Dr Johnson’s – begs for a question-mark, a rising inflection of incredulity, if not outright disbelief ...”

“... write poetry without knowing, for example, about the proper use of runovers used to be considered as impertinent as it would be now to apply for a job as a truck driver without knowing how to shift gear.’ (Wearily, in ...”