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“... see page 752, you ‘mad sod’; ‘Hi, John,’ see page 563, you ‘arse-faced trendy’; ‘Hi, David,’ see page 266, you ‘deaf cunt’, and so on. Less succinct salutations will be discovered by the likes of Donald Davie (‘droning out his tosh’), Ted Hughes (‘boring old monolith, no good at all – not a single solitary bit of good’) and ...”

“... you can write: He’s still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can’t show “still”.’ David Levi Strauss believes that ‘photographs by themselves certainly cannot tell “the whole truth”.’ But he knows what they can do, and he is always looking for the photograph that can show ‘still’. Where these congenial, talkative essays strike away ...”

“... for calculating planetary positions, the latter for describing the physical universe.) Thanks to David Wootton’s careful reconstruction of the writing and printing of the Sidereus (in an article in Issue 6 of Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies), we now know that Galileo’s swaggering pro-Copernicanism, the least plausible of the rival models to most ...”

“... by gassing, starvation and lethal injection to their doctors’ ‘aristocratic’ values. David Blackbourn took the lead in dismantling this paradigm. With Geoff Eley, he wrote The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in 19th-Century Germany (1984), which attacked the new orthodoxy on a number of fronts. Blackbourn’s main ...”

“... at the head of suffrage marches, and carried himself with such distinction that he was called the Grand Duke. To top it all, when I read his diary I discovered he was passionately and very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and ...”

“... the same temperament that made him such excellent company and such a skilled social engineer. As David Brewster wrote in the 19th century, he ‘was a man of the world, much esteemed in society’. He seems to have been one of those who would rather lose a job than a joke. He told one scientific colleague who declined to drink with him on a Friday that he ...”

“... of devolution and of the Union itself. And then – making the large assumption that Salmond’s grand programme was already showing results – independence could come to seem practical, necessary, even a way of keeping Scotland on a course already chosen. Getting the Scots to that point of view within five years appears improbable. But so did the scale of ...”

“... had just returned to Burton Constable, his house in the East Riding of Yorkshire, after a lavish Grand Tour. He and his sister Winifred had spent £7000 and came home laden with pictures, sculptures, books and miscellaneous antiquities. Constable now regarded himself as a connoisseur or, as he put it, ‘a bit of a Vertu’. When the treasures were unpacked ...”

“... echo of distant gunfire. The political debate in The Book and the Brotherhood is conducted between David Crimond, writer of a book of left-wing political theory, and the brotherhood, a sort of trust set up by a group of friends to provide Crimond with a regular income while he writes the book. The brotherhood, otherwise humorously known as the ...”

“... day I remember how precarious the talks had been. Reading an article in the Daily Telegraph where David Trimble concludes his argument for a Yes vote by saying ‘we must have confidence in ourselves to face the future, not use the troubles of the past as a comfort blanket,’ I wonder how many Unionists will follow his advice. The vote will be Yes, but he ...”

“... rest of the book, simultaneous correspondences with two Oxford contemporaries, Frank Thompson and David Hicks, Murdoch, if still not quite a writer, is now at war and no longer the ingénue of the student troupe. The ‘playtime of the ’30s when we were all conscience-ridden spectators’ was over. She remained a Communist, however, toeing the Stalinist ...”

“... than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came from the late David Rockefeller, longtime chairman of the board (his mother, Abby, was a co-founder of the museum), and the other half from just four people: the hedge fund billionaires Leon Black, Kenneth Griffin and Steven Cohen, and the media mogul ...”

“... trend seems to be holding. What claim to permanence can fashion photography have, even that as grand as Vogue’s? At the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of pictures from Vogue on its centenary, ‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style, some, though surprisingly few, of the images are completely unfamiliar. Or perhaps its audience – and this is not a ...”

“... the orange blur of the housing estate behind the castle as if contemplating one of the world’s grand promises. ‘They can’t forget me,’ one of them said, the red-ash pitch blazing under our sandshoes.‘They won’t,’ I said. I wasn’t sure who he meant.‘They will,’ he said. ‘And that makes me want to kill somebody.’The boys were locked in ...”