“... intellectual rainbows curving above them, but have solider rock beneath them. It is difficult to read any of them without a sense of intellectual excitement. Typically composed of a chain of radically unexpected connections across texts often separated by centuries, even millennia, they contain, again and again, arresting discoveries, fruit of that ...”

“... racing. Every day when he got home from work I would go into his bedroom and sit with him while he read out from an evening paper the runners for the following day. Quite often we would all go racing on a Saturday, especially when there was a meeting at Kempton or Hurst Park or Windsor, and this was the one sort of family outing I always wholly ...”

“... She had put in some of her home-made petrol, based on a recipe for petrol substitute she read about several years ago in a newspaper. ‘It was a spoonful of petrol, a gallon of water and a pinch of something you could get in every High Street. Well, I got it into my head, I don’t know why, that it was bicarbonate of soda, only I think I was ...”

“... surprising that such widespread acclaim has been given to a writer who is notoriously difficult to read. Mbembe has been accused of writing at a ‘frustrating level of abstraction’ and performing ‘language acrobatics’. But those who stay the course are rewarded. In Mbembe’s world, figures as disparate as the French anthropologist Claude ...”

“... The doctor wishes to obtain a precise act, the explicit affirmation: ‘I am mad.’ Since I first read this passage of Louren, about twenty years ago, I kept in mind the project of analysing the form and the history of such a bizarre practice. Louren is satisfied when and only when his patient says, ‘I am mad,’ or: ‘That was madness.’ Louren’s ...”

“... show at Shepherd’s Bush … ‘All I saw were a bunch of little kids jumping up and down.’ Peter Dow QC, for Miss Jones, asked: ‘Some of them got a chance that way?’ ‘Having lived with Janie,’ Miss G replied, ‘I know the scene inside out and it sickens me when I think about it.’ ‘Radio 1 was well known to be a law unto itself,’ a BBC ...”

“... its way to the library of Cornell University; quotations from it appear in John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello’s 1997 biography of John Stanislaus. On 26 and 27 and 28 May, Charlie Joyce noted that his father was drunk, and again on 31 May and 1 and 2 and 13 and 14 and 15 June. And on Sunday 24 June: ‘Pappie home to dinner very drunk: shouting, swearing ...”

“... demands on human subjects that are too much to bear. Rereading the famous biographies – Jones, Peter Gay, Max Schur – I was now struck by just how exposed and vulnerable Freud was to the ills, major and petty, of the times, and by the fierce contrasts in his moods between blindness and insight, equanimity and dismay. Freud was articulate about what he ...”

“... have been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies.Though I had read Edward Said, I was still shocked to discover for myself how insidiously Israel’s high-placed supporters in the West conceal the nihilistic survival-of-the-strongest ideology reproduced by all Israeli regimes since Begin’s. It is in their own interests to ...”

“... has mixed feelings about the letter. ‘It sounded all right at the time,’ he said. ‘If you read it, there are a couple of glowing apologies. But there are also lines that sort of say: “We’re sorry it happened – but we’re not.”’As Michael sees it, the apology should have been the start of a process rather than the end. Why didn’t the army ...”

“... in 1995, it rehearsed so many Cold War themes long after the event that one wit remarked it read like the intellectual equivalent of a demand for reimbursement of the Russian loan. But this in no way affected its success in France. Acclaimed as a masterpiece by the media, it was an immediate bestseller, marking the height of Furet’s fame. With this ...”

“... important, is exactly the sign Lubetkin and his collaborators wanted to draw. A sign that read ‘No council block must be just another council block’; a sign that read ‘This matters.’ He doubted even then whether it would be read. Towards the end of his life, he’d come to ...”

“... has made more discoveries of importance about the period than any of his contemporaries. To read Merchants and Revolution is to realise how far revisionist histories – for all the acuity of their negative insights – have tended to tinker at the edges of existing stocks of positive knowledge, truffling in official holdings. Brenner’s book opens ...”

“... more than a year later thanks, in part, to US pressure orchestrated by her old Harvard friend Peter Galbraith. She later described the period in her memoir, Daughter of the East (1988); it included photo-captions such as: ‘Shortly after President Reagan praised the regime for making “great strides towards democracy”, Zia’s henchmen gunned down ...”

“... on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true vocation and chief talent, and he worked at it tirelessly. The great majority of his numerous poems – he described them, without false modesty, as ...”