“... to live within constant striving. It is hard to live within the word ‘degenerative’, which means that, however I strive, I do not win.Of course everyone is striving all their life. And none of us will win against mortality. But there is a difference between striving to (say) learn ancient Greek or do the vacuuming and striving to pay microscopic ...”

“... and political one.An epigraph to one section of Saraswati quotes an American administrator called David E. Lilienthal, writing soon after Partition, who suggested that the Indus pays no heed to borders but ‘just keeps running along’. Lilienthal was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which may explain the slightly blurred quotation from ‘Ol’ Man ...”

“... for, the proper plural of meat being meat. Perhaps meats (on a van: ‘British Premium Meats’) means cooked meats, though meat would still be acceptable there, too. Meats suggests to me something not only cooked but sliced, and already beginning to curl at the edges. Odd that one should have any feelings, let alone care, about such usages.31 January. The ...”

“... him as ‘quite miserable-looking … so thin, so little, so miserable’. The art critic David Bourdon thought his art collection ‘stank’ and took the view that Warhol was nothing more than ‘a window trimmer and chichi East Side gadabout who hung around with trashy people’. In the world of commercial art, as photography began to overtake ...”

“... of Utopia, that inverted image of England, prefer elective to hereditary rule; they devise means to prevent their prince and his advisers from ‘conspiring together to oppress the people in tyranny’; they retain the right to ‘depose’ the prince ‘for suspicion of tyranny’. Around the time he wrote Utopia – and long before Henry presented ...”

“... 1974. The shock of seeing a Tory government evicted by what appeared to be almost insurrectionary means (the mass picketing of the Saltley coke depot was the locus classicus of this image) produced hysteria in the Conservative Party. Some Tory MPs began openly to espouse institutional strategems – PR, a written constitution etc – to prevent any future ...”

“... normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of decades, the ...”

“... was to relieve his readers of that intensity. Whatever the explanation, and though this is by no means the only or best definition of a good readership, I have to acknowledge after decades of teaching that only the rarest of able pupils has agreed to try Dryden, has indeed (it sometimes seems) heard of him. It is true that these rarities have gone on to join ...”

“... not good, it’s good.’ No one is immune to a degree of corniness when it comes to Cannes. David Lynch’s Cannes Diary, a ten-part series of short missives documenting his experience as jury president in 2002, is primarily a vehicle for him to indulge his love of café au lait, pain au chocolat, baguette avec fromage and vin rouge. He praises the ...”

“... discomfort with the structural matrix of his style … de Kooning has reduced his pictorial means … There is enough ‘conventional’ de Kooning here to reassure his uncritical admirers (including the collectors who bought out 90 per cent of the exhibition on opening day), but there is an unusual amount of confused de Kooning, torn between his gift ...”

“... Guardian. He said it would come from journalists he’d worked with there. He was obsessed with David Leigh and Nick Davies, two of the main reporters. ‘Davies is extremely hostile to me,’ Assange said. ‘The Guardian basically double-crossed the organisation in the worst way.’ (The Guardian denies this.) ‘We left them with a cache of cables – to ...”

“... on good terms with friends who could barely stand to be in the same room.’ Ah yes, by all means: to be remote from both sides is a tremendous reinforcement of one’s own rectitude and a tribute in its way to one’s own lonely and yet somehow – yes – brave and upright objectivity. ‘Congratulated himself,’ however: isn’t that slightly to ...”

“... to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of ‘getting to know’ one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worthwhile. We knew one another already; the future was determinate.The lyrical high ends like this: But what – it may reasonably be asked – what about the fact that only a short time before I had ...”

“... government and security officials overseas and in the UK – among them, Assistant Commissioner David Veness, head of Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police, the officer in overall operational charge of countering terror in the United Kingdom. Dr Ranstorp is an expert on Hizbollah, and books such as Palestinian Hamas, Defiant Patriot, The Kidnap ...”

“... is no record of such a letter from Maberley in the Post Office archives.’ This means that either Maberley (who on the evidence of the record was well-disposed to the young clerk) sent an unofficial poison-pen letter, or that there was no official ‘character’ of the damning kind Trollope describes. There would of course be no problem if ...”