“... battered pick-up – ‘Excellent Construction’ – might apply to the novel as a whole. It may be wrong, in any case, to draw large distinctions between travel books and novels. As Raban argues, his travel narratives – like those of W.G. Sebald – are fictions. They are not transcriptions, rattled out as the journey progresses, but artful ...”

“... as an object, a thing, half-separated from its significance. He is creating a formal pattern. He may not be aware that, by repeating the word, he produces this abstract effect on the page. Such an experience of pinkie pointillism may be legible only now, to the reader who has the luxury of seeing the Notebooks as a whole ...”

“... On​ 7 May 1918, a man in Royal Flying Corps uniform presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself ...”

“... the civil service to prepare for a Leave victory, for fear it would look defeatist. After Theresa May replaced him as prime minister, it became clear that no one had any idea what to do, or even what could be done. ‘The British state had not done a shred of preparation,’ May’s deputy, Damian Green, told Tim ...”

“... as much as moral. Faith-accountable fund managers and devout privateers in Malaysia and the Gulf may want a stake in Western wealth creation, but they must try to stick to Islamic principles when they intrude on the money. ‘Leveraging’, ‘derivatives’, ‘shorting’: the ambient glamour of these operations, like the terminology itself, seems ...”

“... toffs. Eliot, who had come to see the village from which one of his ancestors – Andrew Eliot – may have set off for America in the 17th century, was indeed seeking to find a kinship with this still somewhat feudal community. Yet the next sentence of his letter makes it clear he was unsettled to find that the ‘cousin of mine’ in East Coker was not ...”

“... become a tyranny simply because writers call it one. Just as the anti-clericalism of the period may indicate not declining standards among clergy-men but rising expectations among laymen, so the anger about tyranny could reflect not a deterioration of governmental practice but the stricter ethical requirements brought by political Humanism. The notion of a ...”

“... by vintage green Fords. Having kept old cars and dresses in good repair for decades of el bloqueo may at last prove a moneymaker. The island is preparing its return to the ‘US sphere’. And perhaps painting and photograph have more in common, judged strictly as responses to history, than most of us would like to believe. De Kooning’s caricature of ...”

“... I did it. It was a painful business, as the writing of books tends to be. It is true that there may be in one’s life a book that beautifully offers itself, pleading to be taken, simply to be written down, but like other such offers, this one is made only, I think, when one is fairly young. Most of us are self-sentenced to a year or more of un-epiphanic ...”

“... his directness, his mass and variety of achievement. This first of our great professional poets may have understood very fully the oxymoron in that phrase, ‘professional poet’: may have known, even beyond the withdrawals of his own temperament, how many silences went into being so formidably articulate. Biographers ...”

“... Week one:​ 3-9 May. Along with toilet paper, which remains scarce, condolence cards are sold out, though birthday cards are plentiful. Popular images include a trail of footprints in the sand and an angel with its forehead pressed into the crook of its arm.As confirmed American coronavirus deaths pass 67,000, the president declares, in an interview with Fox News held inside the Lincoln Memorial, where events are traditionally banned: ‘They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln ...”

“... which records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London ...”

“... to a dispute agreeing that it is to be privately determined by some other code of law, which may be a religious one. A good many religious organisations and sects require this of their members, and a good many more permit or encourage it. This is not to say that private arbitration within religious communities is without problems, as the archbishop might ...”

“... into prayer rooms, throwing around Qurans, and never apologising for the damage or intrusion. It may be significant that, according to a recent survey, in the 2015 regional elections 51 per cent of the police and the military voted for the National Front. No need, then, to mobilise conspiracy theories to link ideology and practices. The selective application ...”

“... can change very quickly, people not so fast; some are liable to find themselves left behind, which may in fact prove the best and truest place to be.This language is not new. It is very old. Here is Joseph Chamberlain, defector and founder of the Liberal Unionist Party, in 1889: ‘We are Liberals and unchanged, even though our leader has deserted us.’ And ...”