“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Read any interview​ with Lore Segal and she’ll tell you about her shortcomings:I seem to have a reluctance to make things happen.I’m not a grand creator of new characters.I keep rewriting everything 48 times.I don’t have the long breath required to think in terms of a novel.I’m bad at thinking about society ...”

“... towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library ...”

“... on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy ...”

“... at Princeton, to which she had just donated them. She was by then in a wheelchair. Perhaps she read this letter, which uniquely reveals how creativity can be invested in the image of one person: What not only matters but is also absolutely necessary for me this moment is to think that I’m writing for you ... I follow this image of you, in the situations ...”