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“... Roger Penrose​ liked puzzles. In the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out to produce drawings of ‘impossible objects’. Pictorial conventions cue us to perceive two-dimensional drawings as representations of three-dimensional things, but these conventions can also be used to deceive – for example, to depict things that could not exist in three dimensions ...”

“... countryside for the pleasures of London; it was to be found in the Spectator’s portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley; and it reached its apotheosis in Washington Irving’s account of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20). Irving’s was the first, and by no means the last, American contribution to the ...”

“... But the neighbouring streets still provide the decor of deprivation for photographers such as Roger Mayne: scorched curtains, three-legged prams, free-range, snot-rich urchins and, as the architect Peter Barber recalled with nostalgie de la boue, ‘an elderly woman who used to stand at her gate all day long and everybody knew what was going on on the ...”

“... sense, again. There was usually comedy lurking in it somewhere. I remember Doris ringing while Roger and I were in the middle of a furious argument about the details of how the two of us would split up our treasures. House, child, hi-fi. It was clear from my voice that something was up, so I told her what she had unwittingly parachuted into. ‘Oh, for ...”

“... A decade later, a coterie of young, untried artists including Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris set out to adorn the walls of the Oxford Union with similar subjects. But neither Dyce nor the high-spirited youths were qualified to paint in fresco, and the Oxford pictures decayed and disappeared even more rapidly than the ones at Westminster, which ...”

“... meet in turn-of-the-century Berlin. Clive, prone to rashness and played with immense energy by Roger Livesey, is a version of Powell. Theo, reserved and considered, represents an idealised alter ego of Pressburger, who gave him the eloquence and insight Clive lacks. Taken prisoner in England during the First World War, Theo returns at the outbreak of the ...”

“... Governor George Gipps, portrayed with careful scholarship and a novelist’s empathy by Roger Millis in his monumental Water-loo Creek (1992), arrived in Sydney in 1838 wielding the report of a House of Commons committee chaired by the Quaker anti-slavery campaigner and philanthropist Thomas Fowell Buxton. The report was scathing about the treatment ...”

“... England, writing in one of his first Herald articles that Stratford on May Day, with its morris dancers and may poles, furnished ‘an imaginative picture of the very soul of England’ that he had carried with him from Africa.Chesterton had been an underage volunteer on the Western Front, where he won the Military Cross for an attack made ‘over a ...”

“... Republican, he has embraced the idea. He has even hired a Republican political strategist, Dick Morris, to guide his campaign. And Mr Morris has been sharing poll data with Robert Dole, who was until recently Clinton’s complicit partner in the management of the Hill. Only the other week, speaking in Delaware, Dole ...”

“... of mental sloth or moral vacuity,’ opined the anonymous author of the Telegraph obituary. Roger Scruton in his memorial service valedictory saw Fuller’s intellectual life as growth towards a maturity into which he had just entered, a movement towards the familiar shape of right thinking. This was not the Peter Fuller I knew and still miss ...”

“... to write the Preface if you were not going to write the book.’ Then there were Annie Besant, May Morris (especially after her marriage) and Florence Farr, for whom he had a rival in Yeats. Another whose marriage he triangulated was Janet Achurch: yet another, on whom he worked mostly by letter, was Ellen Terry. And there were more actresses, among them Mrs ...”

“... and almost always for a man: ‘Poor Ted.’ Over the years the name changed, ‘Poor Roger’ (my first husband), ‘Poor Peter’ (her son), ‘Poor Martin’ (or any other man who she thought had been treated badly by a woman). But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my time, if only by weeks, in the same way that the end ...”