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“... New York’s Guggenheim Museum contains in an annex a covert Robert Mapplethorpe gallery, a sober exhibition space which, like the masterpieces of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become ...”

“... I asked a senior official whether the PA had any industrial development coaching or extension service. Yes, he said, we have PalTrade (a trade promotion agency). I said that what I had in mind was quite different from trade promotion. Well, he said, we have a Labour Ministry which looks after work conditions in factories. His response illustrates what ...”

“... homes in which uniform people, or so it seems, live according to some extension of the Public Service Act, with rules for dress, for untidiness at weekends, for duty, for spontaneity and for, God knows, maybe even copulation’. It was, he decided, ‘without the least fragment of a doubt … the deadest, dullest, most ...”

“... work ethic. He was going to get the job done and nothing would distract him. He looked more like Robert Shaw, the great villain in From Russia with Love, than like any other Bond. He was unshaken, unstirred; dogged not feline, a terrier who made us wonder what those sleek, overdressed catlike figures had been doing these 44 years. Even his smart suits looked ...”

“... under the Race Relations Act with inciting racial hatred. Leamington Spa at that time was home to Robert Relf, a leader of something called the ‘British Movement’, who had made a name for himself earlier in the 1970s by advertising his house for sale ‘to a white family only’. I don’t remember exactly what Relf’s involvement was in the case that I ...”

“... In the early Fifties the Hon. Angus Ogilvy, after National Service in the Scots Guards and three agreeable years at Trinity College, Oxford, approached his father, the 12th Earl of Airlie, with his plan ‘to do something in the City’. The old earl gruffly dismissed the idea with three monosyllables: ‘They’re all crooks ...”

“... should provide plenty of grist for the biographer’s mill. But here, as in other respects, Robert Graves is an awkward subject, for the salient feature of his career is its lack of obvious stages. Looking backwards from his 70th birthday, he observed contentedly: ‘I always aimed at writing more or less as I still do.’ Having paid his debt to ...”

“... life rather than art to art, or fiction to fiction. In two respects, unfortunately, Fatherland by Robert Harris makes artistic comparisons inescapable. It belongs, first, to that select genre of fiction which deals in the Alternative Present, or in this case an alternative recent past. It is set in 1964 in the vast, imperial, intimidating Berlin of an ...”

“... of the 1980s and 1990s, constitute a betrayal of the basic principles of a nationalised health service. The most fundamental of these principles is that healthcare should be provided on the basis of patient need, not on the basis of marketability, or cost-efficiency, or the appearance of choice. Her book is a furious denunciation of the institutional ...”

“... Grayling honed his talent for spoiling everything he touched, the privatisation of the probation service being his worst policy. His successor, Michael Gove, at least recognised the depth of the problems he inherited. In 2015 he said that British justice was the gold standard for those who could pay, but everyone else ‘has to put up with a ...”

“... In 1954 I was stationed near Versailles, doing my national service with the 93rd Infantry Regiment. I had been called up for 12 months, but like many young Frenchmen of that unlucky generation, I was kept in the Army nearly two and a half years owing to unforeseen ‘events’ in North Africa. We weren’t old enough to have joined either the Free French in Britain or the Resistance against the Nazis in France ...”

“... owed substantial and irrecoverable arrears of pay. He was eventually given a job in the consular service, and there he ended his days. Others were not so fortunate, meeting little sympathy in an Austria defeated and diminished in their absence by the fateful war with Prussia of 1866. The disabled, Etherington-Smith notes, received no compensation or ...”

“... Letters, Robert Lovelace remarks in Clarissa, are a way of ‘writing from the heart’. A brilliant letter-writer though a terrible etymologist, Lovelace finds warrant for this belief in the word correspondence: letters (so he thinks) touch the core, the coeur, of their senders’ being, revealing their innermost thoughts and sensations, showing their essential character ...”

“... This article by Robert Fisk was commissioned by the ‘New Yorker’, who subsequently declined to publish it on the grounds that it was too ‘polemical’ Selma Tawil brought the fifty-year-old keys into the room, sat down in her corner armchair and let them spill out of her hands onto the floor: heavy store-room keys, rusting cupboard keys, keys shaped like backbones for office safes, car keys for an old British-made Hillman, and one larger steel key with a three-and-a-half inch shaft, gun-metal grey with an elegant knot at one end and a broad, worn blade ...”

“... but to no one else, and they inevitably make the collection seem waterish, which does Morris no service. If they were simply copied and duplicates were deposited in five or ten major libraries, they would be easily available to any specialist and might, by their omission, do something to reduce the price of volumes such as these for other readers, who ...”