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“... hosted by Blackwood’s brother. ‘Lucian thought there were lots of girls like her, very, very nice.’ The last painting of Cuthbertson is one of my favourite paintings by Freud. It is titled Night Interior and dated 1968-69. Penelope is a small figure in a large, desolate room. You can sense the silence. The big, dark, uncurtained window behind her is ...”

“... to be home for dinner. And now look! Hospital talk is short and exclamatory. Oops! Careful! Nice and slow! Oh dear! Did that hurt? But the night after the surgery, I felt no pain. Flighted by morphine, I thought that my bed had grown as wide as the world, and throughout the short hours of darkness I made up stories. I seemed to solve, that ...”

“... responsible for Julian’s fondness for country squirely pursuits. There’s a good description by David Garnett of Julian beagling at Cambridge: he was ‘far bigger, noisier and more raggedly dressed than any of his companions … bursting with happy excitement … Late in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped ...”

“... and cities, supporting 1400 projects, far more than any other country in Europe. According to David Mackay, a former officer in the Parachute Regiment who was project manager of the Glasgow CityWatch CCTV system for two years, ‘so positive has central government support been that, by 1997, the bulk of Home Office expenditure on crime prevention was ...”

“... carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or an open sore due to some other ...”

“... a giant painted image of Barbra Streisand – one of the billboard signs he manufactures. Walt, a nice, normal guy, flies off to get his brother out of a jam. The disturbed Travis, however, is obstinately mute, and keeps wandering off again whenever Walt leaves him for a moment; the Henderson brothers live in different American worlds. The cosily domestic ...”

“... in the cult of Mandela. The cult has solid foundations, of course; Mandela himself is far too nice a human being to encourage it – though being human, he undoubtedly enjoyed floating around in the bubble of adulation it created. The facts are that he is a fine-looking man of great moral stature and integrity who displayed a stolid and unbroken resolve ...”

“... Im not​ as fond of David Bowie as most people seem to be. I’m certainly not dancing a reel in the streets. Some good songs, an enviable capacity to shapeshift, but not so much charm, or humility, as some who nevertheless die young, younger, with children and grandchildren to leave. But that more than anything made me tear up during the tribute programmes ...”

“... the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the ...”

“... better lives. Glenny’s book is a warning against such a simple view. No, big gangsters are not nice people: they get what they want through the threat or ultimate use of violence and blackmail. And it’s obvious that their operations can wreck the lives of millions through addiction or – as in the Balkans or Colombia – through the equipping and ...”

“... to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first ...”

“... what made him a winner. Hamilton’s memoir establishes beyond doubt that Armstrong is not a nice person to be around. His take-no-prisoners approach to all aspects of competition made him devious, insensitive and cruel. He bullied his teammates and then, when they showed signs of resistance, replaced them with someone more pliant. Hamilton was forced ...”

“... and wanting and imagining, retained a kind of grandeur, a little big-time glamour – the sheen of nice frocks, the glint of trophies – which has never attached itself to other mass gambling pursuits like the football pools (unless, of course, you’re talking about a strictly Page Three sort of glamour). In a side-chapel of the Natural History Museum, next ...”

“... We would like some examples of ‘the witty and highbrow artistic references’ which her friends, David and Jeremy, bandied about. But all we hear of Jeremy’s thoughts, when he and Rosie ‘tumble’ into bed, is that he thinks ‘fate had brought them together and they’d met in another lifetime.’ Jeremy is respectfully described as a ‘Cambridge ...”

“... Similarities and differences in the equipment evolved by shepherds in various countries reflect a nice adjustment to the particular type of animal bred, to the local environment and to changing technology. The mystery of the domestication of the sheep remains. In retrospect, it was among the most vulnerable of mammals to carnivores, to hunting pressures, and ...”