“... rusting in the weeds, but a few days later we read that the car that belonged to their leader, David Koresh, has been auctioned for $37,500. No word on who gets those big bucks. In the university town of Austin, Texas we begin to see bumper stickers again. They flaunt their hipness: ‘Keep Austin Weird’ is a motto you see on T-shirts and bags, and ...”

“... to. In 1987, in the catalogue published to accompany an exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis referred to Larsen as ‘the mysterious and lovely Virgin Islander’. Eight years later, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis relayed the (unsourced) information that Larsen was looked down on by ‘some of her fellow Virgin Islanders’ for ...”

“... book business since 1960 is, according to Epstein, retrograde. ‘Trade publishing’, by which he means the careful making of good books, is ‘by nature a cottage industry, decentralised, personal’. He concedes that books are a business, but adds ‘though not a very good business’. Like poultry, they thrive best in free-range smallholdings. However, as ...”

“... from Indian takeaways. Within a couple of paragraphs in Injury Time, he moves from Yeats to David Beckham to Dame Gillian Beer – consummations devoutly to be desired. He is consistently pleasantly unpredictable, in the way that, say, E.B. White was consistently pleasantly unpredictable, or perhaps Alastair Cooke delivering his weekly Letter from ...”

“... as well as the patriarch’s retinue of scientists and theologians, stood like a row of Caspar David Friedrich solitaries, facing the ice as if facing their judge. The Ilulissat ice fjord leads back to one of the world’s most powerful glaciers, the Sermeq Kujalleq. Its cliff-like face is three miles wide and, counting its hidden underwater bulk, nearly a ...”

“... the north shore of Queens. ‘New York remains New York,’ one of the Steinways said, ‘and that means a city where democracy called by its true name is the rule of the mob … Heaven help those who by expressing republican sentiment may provoke the rage of the mob.’ The warehouses on the Queens waterfront and on the empty streets leading away from the ...”

“... Crawford, an IFS economist, quoted in the FT: ‘For the Ministry of Defence an 18 per cent cut means something on the scale of no longer employing the army.’ The FT then extrapolates: At the transport ministry, an 18 per cent reduction would take out more than a third of the department’s grant to Network Rail; a 24 per cent reduction is about ...”

“... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is ...”

“... where instability and rivalry are the order of everyday life, war is still diplomacy by other means and there ‘is no deterrent to war as a rational instrument of state policy’. In Yugoslavia, we see these two worlds in collision, the logic of the first confronting the logic of the second in a struggle which is unlikely to be the last of its kind. We ...”

“... West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to ...”

“... contacts with culture. How cunning to choose a place that is impossible to reach by any existing means of transport, other than the crawl through the Blackwall Tunnel (where a single misdirected lorry, trying to pick up time in the fast lane, can get trapped by prophylactic stalactites, and bring London to a standstill). I’d been to the Millennium ...”

“... that estimate. Yet there was no historical evidence or conceivable future state in which the means of subsistence could long support this sexually-powered expansion. Malthus believed that, despite our most strenuous efforts, food resources can only grow in an arithmetic progression (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), with population invariably expanding to soak up ...”

“... for a Scottish Parliament, which was increasingly presented by Labour and others as not only a means of reversing deindustrialisation and reducing unemployment, but of doing so as an expression of Scotland’s authentic left-wing soul. It was assumed that a self-governing Scotland would lurch to the left, perhaps radically so.Over the first two decades of ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”

“... new recruits inspired by the example of Khomeini himself. Hizbullah ‘had two progenitors’, David Hirst wrote in his seminal book on Lebanon, Beware of Small States (2010). ‘If Iran was one – with Syria, so to speak, as midwife – Israel was unquestionably the other. Iran furnished the model and the means, Syria ...”