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“... barefoot and wiped his nose on his sleeve, but he was not going to be treated like this by God or man. Reading William Taubman’s tremendous biography, I see that this sort of thing kept happening to Khrushchev. Take the grand picnic for the Writers’ Union in May 1957, one of his many catastrophic meetings with the Moscow intellectuals, at which, after a ...”

“... touched. ‘Why?’ I asked the Sergeant. ‘Why didn’t he eat anything?’ ‘How do I know, man?’ he said. ‘Maybe he’s not hungry. You know, a lot of detainees don’t get hungry.’ I looked at him in terror at that thought. ‘Is he all light?’ I asked. ‘Is Dave OK?’ ‘Look, man’, he said. ‘I ...”

“... they were Cambridge undergraduates, some thirty years ago. He was called Cristian Huneeus, a young man of landed family, a gentlemanly left-winger and already a published novelist. In those days, British readers were not so interested in South American fiction as they have since become, and few indeed were those who took an interest in South American politics ...”

“... relationships with a cautious benevolence, as if not despairing of the ultimate perfectibility of man. At the same time he was drafting an Olympian message to the vanquished (‘my twenty million subjects!’), a splendid document which Hamilton rightly quotes at length. ‘I want to give you hope’ was its theme: There is every prospect of a good harvest ...”

“... Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which there were more than a million by the end of the decade. A lifetime’s supply cost $150, and the first issue would be ...”

“... Jack Daniels on the contract rider. And then there is the bass-player. The bassist is the other man in the band. This is the guy who is only the other half of the rhythm section: the one who only backs up the drummer: who keeps the beat without setting it: whose job is to go badoompa-doompa-doompa-doom through all the worst and best solo excesses of the ...”

“... in Europe and beyond to send back to their families and friends. A picture of an unfazed young man in a hospital bed reading Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order was suddenly all over the internet. It reminded me of the photograph of three Englishmen choosing books in what remained of Holland House library after the Blitz. The young ...”

“... On 19 July​ 2015, a sullen, hot day with white skies, an unarmed black man was killed in Cincinnati. The incident began when Officer Ray Tensing, a member of the University of Cincinnati campus police, pulled over Samuel DuBose, whose car was missing its front licence plate. Tensing was wearing a body camera, and when the Hamilton County district attorney released the video ten days later, on 29 July, Americans watching the news that night saw about two minutes of what happened ...”

“... singing ‘Amazing Grace’.In speech after speech, Coleman, who died at 85, was remembered as a man who embodied a set of values – freedom, independence, improvisation, cultural survival – that transcend music, values shared by Coleman’s friend John Coltrane, who, just before he died in 1967, requested in his will that Coleman perform at his ...”

“... on as a species of neo-realism, and he has been faulted for not being Vittorio de Sica or Satyajit Ray, when in fact he’s more like Godard or Jean-Marie Straub. It was French enthusiasm for Kiarostami that ushered in the international vogue for Iranian cinema. As we read in the introduction to Dabashi’s book, ‘Kiarostami is like a locomotive that has ...”

“... and punctilio; life was no more than an inventory of small choices that together formed a man’s character, entire.With this went an Edwardian English accent and vocabulary not quite phoney enough to be easily spotted.No wonder Arthur was nicknamed Duke by the rich young Wasps who were his playfellows. Quite soon he turned into a Wasp ...”

“... where his pictures show the influence and the quirky humanity of Cartier-Bresson, Satyajit Ray and, indeed, the sort of aesthetic that Calcutta itself had represented for a century and a half, one concerned with uncovering, through a Modernist paradox, the intimate and the natural in urban disrepair and industrial decay, with recuperating the secretly ...”

“... as he waits in vain for an audience with the chairman of Gosplan – with a detailed X-ray close-up of Lebedev’s cancerous lungs: ‘A drifting, tumbling molecule of benzopyrene … sails into the cell’s bulging curtain wall of fats and sticks there, like an insect caught in glue; then, worse, is dragged through, because the fat curtain is ...”

“... is the dust of war; al-khayda‘a, the dust of a battle. Al-‘ithyar, the dust of feet.’ Man is a microcosm of this sublime universe, as Book II, ‘On the Human Being’, conveys. The human has 360 bones and 360 veins, one for each day of the year. His faculty of reason ‘is analogous to the moon’, al-Nuwayri informs us, ‘because it waxes and ...”

“... being called ‘Bogie’ by people he’d never meet. But he’d only just made it. He was a moody man, a depressive and a needler and often a mean drunk. There was a bitterness at his core: he resented being born on Christmas Day and missing the bounty of a birthday; he reckoned his well-to-do parents didn’t love him enough; he’d had three marriages and ...”