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“... bemused. We hesitate to use the word ‘art’ – this is not Giorgione or the Barbizon School or Howard Hodgkin – and hedge our bets with polite words like ‘artefact’ or ‘decoration’. African narrative and music have done better. World-music impresarios can market the virtuoso kora players of the western Sahel; we have the kitsch academic term ...”

“... cartoon dynasties jostle for position in the commercial Promised Land of mid-Sixties America: Howard Johnson and his lifelong assistant and companion Mildred, both in their declining years, continue to drive the length and breadth of the land in search of the mysteriously (but potently) right locations for the units of their colossal motel-chain; Margery ...”

“... that markets are most likely to drive up is the one that matters most to high-fee-paying students: marks. Way back when, the average mark in the US was supposed to be a C. Nowadays, the more expensive the university, the higher the average mark, with the average in private universities now an A-minus. Why is grade inflation so closely correlated with fee ...”

“... of the Sunday Times Magazine that her husband had ‘a gift for inaccurate précis’. Laurence Marks elaborated on this aside in one of his excellent unsigned profiles for the Observer in 1984: All good raconteurs ornament the truth. Archer’s technique is more radical. The facts of the story are usually true (more or less), but they have been ...”

“... Then one comes across the poem ‘Army’, published by the preternaturally far-sighted Howard Sergeant in the pamphlet Fleshweathercocks in 1973, when Duffy was just 18 years old. It begins: Hello mother! It’s your eldest son back from the nuclear war, well, half of me anyway. How are you mother? Oh it’s good to see you too, considering the ...”

“... tracks, holding the hand of one’s governess’. Her closest relationship was with her brother Howard Nemerov, who was to become a distinguished poet. The younger sister Renée seems an isolated figure by comparison. There appear to have been incipiently incestuous tensions within the family; in Howard’s poem ‘An Old ...”

“... who could not afford them yet – and of pale, hungry-looking Russian soldiers who, on pay of 24 marks a month, knew that they could never afford them. But one day blood will flow through the atrophied veins of the East German economy and the DDR will once more be a healthy limb of a reunited Germany. One day. Meanwhile the West Germans contemplate with ...”

“... 1st, Catherine of Aragon; 2nd, Anne Boleyn; 3rd, Jane Seymour; 4th, Anne of Cleves; 5th, Catherine Howard; 6th, Catherine Parr etc). The authors have made their own compromise, which, as the price of retaining connected prose, offers a highly selective summary of salient events. It is instructive to observe how precious space has been allocated. The monarchs ...”

“... but they are more ‘abstract’, if by this we mean they are a-semiotic, without the support of marks that can more or less easily be taken to be either a deformation of something in the world (as in Cubism) or a visual language or code that by convention represents or intervenes in the world (Surrealism, German Expressionism). The works that these artists ...”

“... was a 20-year-old woman wearing white jeans and a white tank top who had two parallel black pen marks running up and down her nose. She told me she’d dropped out of college and come to New York looking for a ‘fashion industry internship’. She was from a small town in California. She kept losing track of what she was talking about as people spilled out ...”

“... to correct in her version of The Prisoner. When sleeping, Albertine is said to shed ‘the various marks of humanity which had so disappointed me’, ‘ses différents caractères d’humanité qui m’avaient déçu’. Even in the most recent revision of Scott Moncrieff décevoir is still read as if it means ‘deceive’. Albertine sheds ‘the different ...”

“... moves from the site of her father’s first oilfield to the site of her reforming achievements at Marks and Spencer. ‘What were my qualifications?’ she asks in her foreword. ‘A Russian soul, a Jewish heart, and a British passport.’ The British reader’s heart sinks a little: ‘by herself and Barnet Litvinoff’ seems to imply the indulgence of a ...”

“... of Carlylean black beasts with bilious diatribe: ‘Model Prisons’ (in anticipation of Michael Howard), ‘Downing Street’ (it was currently being rebuilt – as a temple to ‘Redtape’, according to Carlyle), ‘Jesuitism’ (this was the period of the ‘Catholic Aggression’, wormwood to the Calvinist Scot), ‘Hudson’s Statue’ (a proposed ...”

“... With the appearance of Sherston’s Progress in 1936, Siegfried Sassoon completed what Howard Spring, writing in the Evening Standard, called ‘the most satisfying piece of autobiography to be published in our time’. Other reviewers and commentators, then and later, seem to have agreed with Spring’s assessment ...”

“... of the icon that stands in for Clift, a potent image of the suffering star. Having seen himself in Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), Clift, so the story goes, knew that fame was coming to him, and grabbed the opportunity to get drunk anonymously one last time. In the years of his renown, it could seem as though his aim was to hold on to that anonymity while ...”