“... Lawrence, which may have been intended to convey a kinship with Lawrence of Arabia. In Durban he read Trollope to improve his English, and became friendly with two older writers, Roy Campbell and William Plomer, who had started Voorslag, a short-lived but now legendary literary magazine. Both Campbell and Plomer soon turned their backs on South Africa, and ...”

“... through in his disputatious works: ‘I mean not to dispute Philosophy with this Pork, who never read any.’ Certainly he knew too much about more or less everything. He was steeped in classical poetry and almost every line he wrote is in close conversation with one source or another. His relationship to Ovid, beautifully explored in a recent book by Maggie ...”

“... a kind of thing that requires a man to be self-collected. He must be alone with it ... no man can read a Book well with the bustle of three or four hundred people about him! Even forgetting the mere facts which a Book contains, a man can do more with it in his own apartment, in the solitude of one night, than in a week in such a place as the British ...”

“... he would have to give it up. (‘I couldn’t sit there with four students, all eccentric, and read this little script. I just couldn’t.’) So he decided to embark on a training analysis at the local Institute in preparation for a second career. As with everything else in his life, he was first enraptured, then bored – though to begin with, he was ...”

“... be smuggled out too. Even so, she has found herself stumped by much of the correspondence she has read, such as this gnomic message from an agent in August 1944: ‘I haven’t been able to get any of the iced lobster, but Information Item No. 295 which ANGELLA brewed up will give you a slant on this – perfume or butter?’ Such was the secrecy that most ...”

“... written texts are not so fixed as one might assume. Neither the Chinese nor the British officials read the originals of the messages from the other side; they were content to receive translations (and the British were willing to accept a translation rendered from a recitation of the text). In such circumstances, Harrison emphasises, meanings become ...”

“... Vanessa Bell disagreed with her brother Clive over this issue. In January 1913 she wrote to Leonard Woolf: The reason I think that artists paint life and not patterns is that certain qualities of life, what I call movement, mass, weight, have aesthetic value. But where I would quarrel with Clive is when he says one gets the same emotion from flat ...”

“... string of different beads. Transitions are sometimes awkward: ‘The times were a-changing,’ we read at the end of Chapter Two, on the fall of the Romanovs, ‘and hopes and fears changed with them.’ But the periodisation is generally successful, avoiding the pitfalls of a ‘sequence of reigns’ approach (Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and so on). The five ...”

“... to make up for Woolf’s (almost) non-appearance at Harrison’s funeral, when Virginia and Leonard arrived so late that they only ‘marched in’ (Virginia’s words) as the service was ending. Characteristically, perhaps, she blamed their lateness on the funeral’s unfashionable location in East Finchley: ‘somewhere out of the world where buses ...”

“... that time still with blondish hair and the face yet to go under the harrow.I don’t think I’d read much of his poetry or would have understood it if I had, but when Auden gave his inaugural lecture as professor of poetry the following year I dutifully went along, knowing, though not quite why, that he was some sort of celebrity. At that time I still ...”

“... than in the post-October path towards terror and dictatorship. Orlando Figes, author of a widely read study of the revolution, The People’s Tragedy (1996), devotes a lively essay to showing that, had a disguised Lenin not been admitted without a pass to the Congress of Soviets on 24 October, ‘history would have turned out differently.’ In play here are ...”

“... In the morning Frederick would walk to the Royal Torbay Yacht Club, drink a glass of sherry, read the newspapers and walk home for luncheon. In the afternoon he would walk back to the club and weigh himself. He died in 1901, leaving the family financially embarrassed. Clara preserved his last letter, the order of service from his funeral, some beech ...”

“... with white faces and heavily kohled eyes hurried out towards Praed Street’ – the book is best read with a streetfinder close to hand – ‘as if hastening to appointments with abortionists in seedy consulting rooms behind the Edgware Road’. Alas, times have changed since 1967, when the novel was first published, as much in Bayswater and environs as in ...”

“... placard, shading in the letters of a message that she later tied to one of the crowd barriers. It read, very roughly: Thank you, Assange, for giving us a history of the vanquished. She was thinking of something by Brecht, she said, or possibly Walter Benjamin. An older, more eccentric figure assured me that Assange had sneaked away from the embassy the week ...”

“... Friendship Association, an organisation firmly loyal to the Communist regime. Professor Leonard Hawkes, the leader of the delegation, was a geologist famous for pointing out that England was slowly tilting into the North Sea. The novelist and translator Rex Warner had been a left-winger in his youth but was now a comfortably-off, convivial ...”