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“... raised their eyebrows, as if this was the way of the industrialised world. Wasn’t everybody? Sir Denis Barnes spent his entire civil service life (apart from one brief early interlude) at what was the Ministry of Labour and is now the Department of Employment. He rose from being Ernest Bevin’s private secretary to Permanent Under-Secretary. He ...”

“... the text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war correspondent William Walton said to Denis Brian, ‘a man who has spent all his life inventing fiction keeps on inventing it in his private life.’ The reaction started with the publication of Death in the Afternoon in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently expresses it, is not ‘a ...”

“... France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis ...”

“... No one could read Sir Denis Barnes’s book, Governments and Trade Unions,* without a sense of deep depression. He himself foresees that a ‘continuation of the existing relationship between governments and the trade-union movement … could have unpredictable political consequences’. So could a discontinuity! Mr Harold Macmillan is fond of recounting how kings, barons, soldiers, landowners, industrialists and bankers have all in time been diminished by our institutions, and he speculates that trade-union leaders will go the same way ...”

“... Rossetti, Arnold, Hopkins, Hardy and Yeats. There are suggestive affiliations, as between Barnes and Hopkins, but no single narrative has explanatory power. A study of the emergence of modern poetry would need at least six lines of affiliation, by my count. More, if we included the American poets. Karlin’s anthology would belie its title, but it ...”

“... Denis Healey, a politician who long ago established that the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit ...”

“... When​ the Italian theorist Ricciotto Canudo pronounced cinema the ‘seventh art’ in 1911, photography had the right to sulk: after all, what was this arriviste form but a succession of photographs made to move? Photography had not received such commendation in the sixty years of its existence. But like jazz, it was an art that seemed to arrive fully formed and any such formal consecration might probably have been as bad for 20th-century photography as it would have been for jazz ...”

“... by Marquet, four by Carrière, three by Marie Laurencin (from her best period), four by Maurice Denis (who doubtless looked the most avant-garde of the Nabis, and is now on his way back up), three by Forain, and two by Puvis de Chavannes (has anyone’s reputation fallen further in the last hundred years?). There are also two by Signac and one by Cross ...”

“... you both despise me.’ ‘Listen.’ She brought him away from the door and closed it. Mrs Barnes next door, who had once described their marriage as uninhibited, was putting out a few opportune clothes. ‘Your father is 74. He is dying. Considering the time you’ve been hanging about here he is possibly already dead yet you resent the fact that he ...”

“... Monet, Pissarro, Degas, and even non-Impressionists like Puvis, Léon Bonnat, Sargent and Maurice Denis – recognised Morisot’s quality and treated her as an equal. Durand-Ruel, the pioneering dealer who (a century before Saatchi) batch-bought rising artists, took four of her pictures in 1872. Even the critics paid her the compliment of condemning her ...”

“... most deprived part of Paris.’ Hazan, like Robb, spares a few sentences for the church of Saint-Denis-de-la-Chapelle, ‘buried in a cape of sick concrete’; then mentions a brief non-adventure of André Breton’s in the area. But even here he finds a ‘hidden charm’ in the little Chinese quarter, the ‘welcoming cafés on rue l’Olive’, and the ...”

“... and of all its farce, And think of all those books gone down the drain By Amis, Amis, Bainbridge, Barnes, Bragg, Braine ... But artists of all kinds can be excused For cherishing a stratified society. Their privilege, which exists to be abused, Is to lay hold of life in its variety. Granted they do it well, we are amused And readily forgive the note of piety ...”

“... Prize. The lack of an award that year seemed to reproach the others on the list (Karen Russell and Denis Johnson) for still being alive. He didn’t get to finish. In the ‘Notes and Asides’ at the end of The Pale King, Wallace is alive too; you can hear his voice tilting up with the question marks: ‘Film interview’ a sham? Point is to extract from ...”