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“... of public expectation, and how to meet it, that bedevilled Nancy Reagan during her time in the White House. ‘By the end of 1981,’ she tells us, ‘I had a higher disapproval rating than any first lady of modern times.’ Joan Didion called her smile ‘a study in frozen insincerity’. Gloria Steinem called her ‘the marzipan wife’. The Chicago ...”

“... of show-business, it is unlikely that any overweight person will ever again be elected to the White House. A necessary (if not sufficient) condition for electoral success nowadays is that one should ‘come over well’ on television. And fat people, by and large and on the average, do not. Mr Cockerell’s absorbing book might, at first, be seen as a ...”

“... a blind man who is also a midget and pulls a little cart. He was looking very closely at his white stick. Though I have found it very hard to convince Carmen Callil – who believes that, since she occasionally sees me out in the evening, I am out in the evening all day – I am actually on my own all day every day. And since I am single, this would mean ...”

“... was an explosion of hot air and hot water. For two, perhaps three seconds, a gigantic, blinding white shard of glass from a broken cosmic window danced in the sky, insubstantial yet overwhelmingly powerful. Ten thousand trumpets and twenty thousand drums could not have made as much noise as that bolt of lightning; it was positively deafening. The sea turned ...”

“... inventory of population, livestock, crops and landholdings was conducted by Cromwell’s adviser William Petty after the conquest of Ireland, the better to plunder the country’s natural resources and divide the spoils among the conquerors. Cadastral surveys were instituted as a normal administrative routine by the British in India long before they came to ...”

“... the GOP’s stated long-term national strategy. His apparent tolerance for and sometime stoking of white nationalists (the going euphemism for neo-Nazis) and his abandonment of ethnic dog whistles in favour of blatantly racist rhetoric have painted the GOP into a corner as the party of the resentful and ageing portion of a ...”

“... poets to Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 whiskeys that killed him; 23 Fitzroy Road, where Plath laid her head on a folded towel in the gas oven; Missolonghi, per Byron; Rome, to the Keats-Shelley House; Vienna, where Auden bore out his own ...”

“... advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s ‘rank growth’. Dickens was true neither to life nor to his age. He was a cartoonist rather than a documentarist – not that the veracity of documentarists is to be ...”

“... in New York City. ‘It was wonderful, and revelatory as it always is,’ he told his friend Tony White. ‘I learn more about people and myself in NY than anywhere else. I got offered a job in a tough-queer 3rd Avenue bar the day before I left, and if I hadn’t been under contract to Berkeley I’d have accepted it’ (he’d been given a visiting ...”

“... reclining figures in the foreground with its light blues and greys and dabs and dashes of creamy white, enlivened by touches of pink and vermilion, is rhymed with the pale buildings of the distant city, rather as the buff pink of the soil repeats the colour of the sky. In his great portraits of the 1790s Goya contrasts such delicate harmonies with a black ...”

“... William Empson maintained that there was a right and a wrong moment to bring theory into the business of intelligent reading, and that the professionals chose the wrong one, but he could not do without theory altogether. His book The Structure of Complex Words (1951) contains quite a lot of it; so it is not surprising that a generation of literary theorists, not wishing to remain totally out of touch with the best critic of his time, has decided to appropriate Complex Words, a work hitherto much less influential than the very early (and prodigious) Seven Types of Ambiguity ...”

“... he lists Henry Vanderborcht, John Vander-heydon, Adrian Van-Diest, Sir Anthony Vandyck, William Vander-velde, Francis Vanzoon, Herman Verelst and F. de Vorsterman, and with a little more diligence he could easily have doubled this collection of foreign Englishmen. Of the 106 painters accorded a biographical sketch by Buckeridge, 55 were immigrants ...”

“... of the press) proclaiming ‘Get your racist education at Stanford.’ The acronym DWEM (dead white European male) and the neologism ‘freshpeople’ were giggled over at dinner parties. Jesse Jackson visited the campus and was greeted by five hundred students chanting ‘Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Western Culture’s got to go’ (the course, they meant – but it ...”

“... or wrote but never finished, with fantastic, phantom, harpooning titles like In Ballast to the White Sea, La Mordida, Swinging the Maelstrom. All these things – books, changed circumstances, surgery – are cures of one sort or another, for as Stephen Spender remarked in his introduction to Under the Volcano, ‘with Lowry one is never far away from the ...”

“... a prescription for public policy, made on the understanding that something could be done. Men in white coats should be given the funds to get back to their laboratories and defeat Aids. And ‘ought’ in the sense that we had a particular duty to a persecuted group. As well as the practical, good-housekeeping kind of ‘ought’ there was an ...”