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“... and almost never – a further compliment – to the contemporary writers he most resembles, Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami, whose amiable postmodern noirs unfold in urban labyrinths and feature cerebral men searching for their own identities, and enigmatic women with an alarming tendency to vanish. He has produced novels with fantastic industry, and ...”

“... of fascism and the Spanish Civil War. We know he and Ruth socialised with the singer and radical Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda, and with a brilliant former student, the Pan-Africanist and communist George Padmore. We know British intelligence kept an eye on his movements.In September, Bunche’s family went home. He went to South Africa to figure out how ...”

“... stinging nettles, rounded unknown corners, then ascended a rolling procession of new-old Kentish hills: hills that must have been quite close by, but, uncannily, never seemed to exist except on that particular day. At the top of these, the sky suddenly lifting, an astonishing vista broke out before us: greensward and chalk ...”

“... he and his Asian colleagues have a map session before we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills. The cab is old and draughty, it’s beginning to snow and as we drive through this landscape of lost villages and frostbitten fields it gets more and more foggy and like a journey out of Le Grand Meaulnes. It’s all of an hour before we reach the church ...”

“... Congo, settling in camps around Goma on the northern shore of Lake Kivu. Rwanda’s new leader, Paul Kagame, lean, driven and possessed of martial discipline, was furious that Zaire had provided shelter for Hutu killers. Very few of the Hutu in Goma took part in the murders, but the death squads were regrouping in the camps, and Kagame saw them as an ...”

“... by Mademoiselle Sergent, the plain-but-stylish headmistress. Exams are sat, green woods and hills are rhapsodised, an exhibition of needlework features a surprising quantity of chemises and beribboned knickers. The candour, the curiosity, the wit, the bubbling prose, are a joy.It’s true that bits of all the Claudine books are ...”

“... him, an owl (or perhaps it’s a bat) flies across a large moon that looms over a range of rounded hills. From among them a spindly church spire can just be seen stretching up into the sky; the foreground is filled by heavy ears of corn gathered around the central figure like a comfy blanket. The reclining man is apparently undisturbed by the two hefty cows ...”

“... Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of flowery autobiographical pensées.) She also bagged the ...”

“... were in cahoots, Belloc added a layer of antisemitism. Like his hero the writer and politician Paul Déroulède, Belloc felt France had been unbearably shamed by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and wanted revenge against the compromisers and financial interests that had undermined army morale. A thoroughgoing anti-Dreyfusard, he merged conspiracy theories ...”

“... no appeal, the one ‘likeness’ guaranteed to show you looking the way you never want to look. Paul Fussell called it ‘the most egregious little modernism’, redolent of ‘the world of Prufrock and Joseph K and Malone’, and indeed every time my photo is scrutinised by a passport officer, it’s as if I’ve entered that same world of anxiety and ...”

“... with snow and in the late afternoon bathed in a rich tawny light, the valleys in shadow with the hills still catching the sun. We have tea at Muker, where we look in the church which is dull and scraped, how dull one can see from an old photograph of the way it was before it was done up in the 19th century – galleried with a three-decker pulpit and looking ...”

“... in every drama. Thus when the young Raymond, a lad of 11 or 12, rushes out onto the hills, Fred lumbers after him, noting the way the bracken bends and breaks under the thunder of his running. When, in Normandy, in 1944, Raymond is commanding an anti-tank unit, Inglis, a military enthusiast, is sweating in the turret. When Raymond goes to ...”

“... Given Dun’s poetic manifesto, based on a reading of Blake, an interpretation of the pattern of hills and rivers, the events of 7 July can be seen as the inevitable consequence of our refusal to remember, our communal amnesia. Blake’s city of gold, its pillars aligned with London topography, has been wilfully set aside. The legends of Chatterton and ...”

“... ruins, the exploration of geographical and social wastelands. Some, following in the footsteps of Paul Theroux’s Kingdom by the Sea, see the Northern towns as horrors. Others, indignant at the haemorrhage of jobs and skills, chart the progress of disindustrialisation. Ian Jack’s Before the Oil Ran Out and Robert Chesshyre’s The Return of a Native ...”

“... so I’ve decided to stop being one. After a while we got his new business card: Lanchester Jean-Paul Monet. You’re getting more French, we said, but you can’t speak French. I’m working on it, he said: the key lifestyle decision is the name change. You have to call me ‘Lanchester’ now. What with work, Arthur, the gym, the shooting classes and ...”