“... Duchesse de Guermantes and finds her going to a party. He blurts out that he is mortally ill and may not be seeing her again. She ignores this news and gives him a smiling farewell as she gets into her carriage. E.M. Forster thought the scene one of the most odious in the novel, or rather in the Novel, and he seems to assume, rather naively, that Proust is ...”

“... for a late and largely undetected Labour surge in the run-up to the 2017 general election, Theresa May might now be steering us through the Covid-19 crisis: trusted, sensible and reliable, however costively unimaginative and incapable of the nimble feats of very un-Conservative gymnastics so far performed by Boris Johnson’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak. And ...”

“... that provide clues and proceed, with varying degrees of caution, to do some invention. The story may then become so complicated that even reasonably sober academic biographers have to alter the whole shape of the early career to accommodate their guesses. When the fiction is provided by someone whose business is precisely the writing of fiction the invention ...”

“... dicta gathered together in the Yale Book does bring to mind a quotation from the only song by David Byrne for which it finds space: ‘You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?’How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody ...”

“... is it for? Who and what should be included in it? And where does it take place? For all that it may appear to offer a uniquely intelligible account of a clearly demarcated political and geographical space, national history is intrinsically problematic. Territorial and maritime boundaries are usually porous. The frontiers of virtually all self-proclaimed ...”

“... Faulkner reread it every year. Joyce talked about its ‘unforgettable scenes … Madness, you may call it’ – but that was the secret of its ‘genius’. Philosophers were crazy for it too. Wittgenstein, who had read it ‘an extraordinary number of times’, went around quoting bits to friends. Heidegger kept a portrait of Dostoevsky on his ...”

“... with the artist, who had been similarly equipped.                   I may be needing a new cover, signals Cupcake, John Hollander’s secret agent in his marvellous book-length poem Reflections on Espionage:                                      I worry Mostly, though, how having been made ...”

“... is a culture of narcissism. If you rather admire these people’s attitudes and way of life, you may describe it as a culture of tolerance. If you have mixed feelings, you might settle for the description Charles Taylor suggests: it is a culture of authenticity. Taylor says that we ought neither to boost this culture (in the manner of the truly dreadful ...”

“... becoming politicised. Of the five thousand clubbers who go through these doors in a weekend, many may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music ...”

“... in living standards – ‘Now there appears to be but one order of people, a middle Class as they may be called’ (Tuesday, 14 September) – while deploring the general lack of decorum. Madame Récamier comes in for censure on the low cut of her dress. There are also revealing accounts of major artistic and political personalities, including a description ...”

“... There was a press conference on the 19th and the public picked up the 1918 connection on the 20th. David Sencer, Director of the Center for Disease Control at Atlanta, Georgia, prepared a memorandum called ‘Swine Influenza: action’. It went via the secretaries of health, education and welfare to President Ford. On 24 March a ‘Blue Riband Panel’ of ...”

“... it, because not understanding it in scientific terms is not to understand it at all, but David Bodanis, the author of E=mc2, is not one of them. As someone to whom science has always been a black hole, I see Bodanis and those who bother to try to explain to the likes of me what they understand mathematically as therapists of a sort. Not to understand ...”

“... In​ 2015 Theresa May, who was then home secretary, announced that there would be an inquiry into undercover policing and the operation of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). This secret unit, whose purpose was to infiltrate subversive groups, was set up in 1968 as part of Special Branch in response to protests against the Vietnam War ...”

“... by more than eighty. Not only can the American Skyhawks be launched from the carrier 25th of May, but, with spare parts from the United States, Sidewinder missiles, and extra fuel tanks to enable them to loiter over the Falklands, they are now altogether more formidable than they were two and a half years ago. Some of the Mirage III Super-Etendards have ...”

“... the English country gentleman, who is rarely a gambling man, because gambling, however foolish it may be, has a point to it, and the English country gentleman prefers to do things that have no point. The English race as a whole loves the apparently pointless ... The English worship things whose appeal mystifies those who are not English: cups of tea, rain ...”