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“... Some years ago Stephen King announced that he would put his new book online before publication, for anyone to read freely. His publishers were spitting dollar signs and the fans delighted. In my memory he did as he said, and put the entire book on his website, but the 100,000-or-so words of the manuscript, though all there, were in alphabetical order ...”

“... and you can see smoke from blazes far back in the wilderness. There Norman Maclean as a boy and young man learned from his father, a Presbyterian minister, about rectitude, pride, hard work, the doctrine of grace and the art of fly-fishing. He hiked, camped and hunted in the mountains, fished in the rivers. At 15 he began to work for the Forest Service ...”

“... for plundering of ships on the Spanish main. The jury found us guilty and we are condemned to die. Young men, a warning take by me, and shun all piracy. No doubt the judge told them, before he passed sentence, that they were enemies of mankind (hostis humani generis in legal Latin); but he would not have told them that they were outlaws without the right to a ...”

“... French soldiers were sent to snuff out jihadism but they found ex-slaves and former masters, young rebels and gerontocrats, smugglers of cigarettes and petrol, vast communities of the unemployed. The list is long. That some of them, torn between grievances and greed, were also terrorists is no surprise, but the French couldn’t tell them ...”

“... Stephen Wall sees as crucial those passages in An Autobiography where Trollope rhapsodises on his equality with the personages of his fiction: ‘There is a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the clothes they wear ...”

“... to say, a three-quarter inch replica in painted gold, which I at once passed on to the next pretty young woman I met to hang on her charm bracelet. The relevant correlative? A little ethnic gesture to catch another little ethnic vote. In a word, politics. What I now sardonically call my memory flew next to a neighbouring State where another gentleman of Irish ...”

“... does Privy Councillor Goethe need to do that?’ Right, I’ll tell you – why does he make young Werther put a bullet through his head? Because – and this can be proved – Goethe himself was on the brink of suicide, so in order to rid himself of the temptation he makes Werther do it for him! You see? He goes on living, but it’s the same as if ...”

“... to be a mysterious cove comprehensible only to his pals (among whom Waugh did not number himself). Stephen Spender, Waugh declared, had been granted at birth all the fashionable literary neuroses but his fairy godmother ‘quite forgot the gift of literary skill’. (Once celebrated as the Shelley of the Thirties, he was later described by Geoffrey Grigson as ...”

“... view of human nature taken by philosophical political activists (starry-eyed when they are young) who set going the machinery of revolution. There is obvious truth in this, but the lesson is hypocritical when used to justify the rapacious opportunists of the Open Market economy on the grounds that their system is ‘human nature’. The good luck which ...”

“... couldn’t have envisaged. The Nation’s and New Age’s subscribers, Fabian Society members, young students drawn towards socialism, admirers of Shaw or of Arnold Bennett were, if not exactly the same people, at least fluent speakers of the same political and cultural dialects. They formed an essentially cohesive left-wing intellectual class which ...”

“... conclusion was foregone and the trial – of Socrates for inculcating unofficial ideas in the young; of the white men arraigned before an all-white Mississippi jury for the abduction and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till; of Sir Walter Raleigh for an imaginary treason – simply a public enunciation and endorsement of it. That at least is what we ...”

“... idiom, he was essentially a verist. In fact, his whole quarrel with the operatic stage of his young manhood, which he knew all too well from galley years as chorus master and musical director in more or less decrepit opera houses from Würzburg to Riga, was precisely that it was weighed down by convention and artifice (I’ve always loved his description ...”

“... the wannest of smiles, nowadays, to greet the announcement that the Arts Council is subsidising a young artist to make piles of rubbish in the ‘back streets’ of Bootle? Mrs Huxley trades too much on the comic stereotypes of the English scene, and only in a splendidly disorganised ‘Bed Race’ towards the end of the novel does her satire strike a ...”

“... a looming food security problem. Africa was the obvious target: a continent of one billion mostly young inhabitants – two billion by 2050 – and 60 per cent of the earth’s uncultivated land, plus one third of its mineral riches. The aftermath of the Cold War allowed Beijing to come in with a low bid for Africa. In the early 1990s, after the demise of the ...”

“... in Schull, County Cork. Presumably it was a financial blow when his father died, but Synge was too young to feel a difference, and besides there was enough money coming from rented estates in Wicklow. The Synges were landlord-class, with the mentality that went with such privilege. As a young man, John thought himself some ...”