“... village were no longer peasants but citizens. The place and period will be familiar to readers of George Sand, ‘La Bonne Dame du No-hant’, who lived only ten miles away, and created a timeless portrait of la France profonde based on the region, though writing the railway out and standardising her peasant characters’ French to make it comprehensible. The ...”

“... eye for the vagaries of upper-class behaviour. The editor, Philip Ziegler, tells us that the King (George V) felt that an extended imperial tour by his first-born would not only strengthen ties of friendship but weaken the infatuation felt by his son for Mrs Dudley Ward. This cure for love called for the services of the battle cruiser Renown, which used 35,798 ...”

“... as a scientist. A stranger who rides in from the Karoo tells him a story – ‘The Search for the Bird of Truth’. But Waldo, though he understands the allegory, dies without getting his opportunity, ‘In after years,’ Olive wrote, ‘we cry to Fate, “Now, deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will, but let us never again suffer as we suffered ...”

“... gifted men attached to that endeavour: the director was Peter Brook; the choreographer, George Balanchine; Oliver Messel was responsible for the legendarily enchanting decor and costumes.’ Fey, Warholish asides about literature just can’t be shut out (‘I like Agatha Christie, love her. And Raymond Chandler is a great stylist, a poet. Even if ...”

“... Table. His fever-stricken and apparently demented curate, Forsythe, has even stuffed a white bird, approximating to a dove, which is to be hung above the altar to represent the Holy Ghost in flight; moreover, he has obliged their dog to fast during Lent. This latter is a nice stroke of humour, since all dogs in India live on the edge of starvation. The ...”

“... bloke to ten years’ imprisonment – he fell down the stairs. (Laughs) ... So I decided to do me bird, come out, turn it all in and finish it. Who says that judges don’t have a sense of humour? Moira, a dope-dealer – they are not quite all businessmen – recounts a narrow squeak. She had been in her car with four kilos of dope and a passenger well ...”

“... the sexual habits of each others’ mothers, while forceful white fathers, called things like ‘Bird’ and ‘Buck’, tend to beat their children. Truck Schultz mouths off on air because as a boy he was too much of a wimp to kill a deer. As for Dr Clarence Mather, who teaches a course called Introduction to Native American Literature – well, Marie ...”

“... time before trailing along Victoria Street to spend the night in the refuge in the basement of St George’s Church, where occasionally I would do night duty myself, sleeping on a camp bed in a room full of these sad, defeated, utterly unthreatening creatures. With its mixture of readers and its excellent facilities (it was a first-rate library) and the ...”

“... bought the house in which I shall be murdered.’There are different accounts of how Bacon met George Dyer late in 1963. One is that Dyer, a rather good-looking cat burglar from the East End of London, fell through Bacon’s skylight like a gift from heaven, and that Bacon threatened to call the police if Dyer didn’t have sex with him. They are more ...”

“... broad a concept that it explains everything and nothing. Towards the end of the book, he quotes Dr George Moore’s Man and His Motives, published in 1848: The infant no sooner moves its limbs, and feels that they are moved at its will, than it begins to enjoy itself in the use of its own power, for power is evinced only in action, and every action is a ...”

“... a novel, the diary that Lenin ought to have kept, but didn’t. For the first few weeks, the caged bird sang. Then, when I had finished Lenin’s childhood, I realised something I should have understood before I started. I could invent his comments, thoughts, feelings on any subject where these could only be guessed. But if I wanted to be taken seriously as a ...”

“... its intended purpose because we had to keep the windows open to avoid death by poison gas. George McGovern was running for President, Edward Heath was prime minister, and our landlord had yet to discover how to make water hot. Sick dialogue came easy in Norwich. What Ian always had was a great library, an ominous tide of titles that splashed out of ...”

“... original molecules. Some preservation methods are more effective still. In 1982, the entomologist George Poinar and electron microscopist Roberta Hess published a paper on a 40-million-year-old fossil fly stuck in a glob of amber. Exquisite images taken with Hess’s instruments reveal individual cells in the fly’s abdomen, frozen in death, a microscopic ...”

“... as the mother whose caresses would calm his frenetic disposition. Together with Watts Dunton and George Borrow – then over seventy – he would bathe in the Putney ponds ‘with a north-east wind cutting across the icy waters like a razor’. No towels of course: Borrow would run about the grass like an elderly dog, shaking himself to get dry. For ...”

“... across the street from the church, in a section of the island called Sandy Ground. His name is George Hunter and he is 87 years old. One summer Saturday Mitchell takes the ferry from Manhattan to visit him. He finds Mr Hunter at home, in a tidy shingle-front house with lightning rods. A trellised rambler rose shades his screened front porch. ‘Come on ...”