“... The pub was run by a delightful family, a handsome widow and her two pretty daughters. We once took an American to luncheon there. Could he have been an American officer? I can’t remember. When I remarked that it was lucky to find such nice people in the local, he replied: ‘I’ve often heard that said over here. I don’t understand it. In the US we ...”

“... their mothers. And I liked old ladies who’d led interesting lives.One night in January 2002, she took me and some friends to see Saturday Night Live. (She’d been working on a New Yorker profile of the producer, Lorne Michaels, for thirty years.) It was the night Monica Lewinsky was doing a special guest appearance. What I remember most about Lillian that ...”

“... Naipaul’s books. On being introduced to him I told him how much I liked them, and he immediately took to me. No one else at the university had made that effort, but a writer, a brilliant writer like Naipaul, was a powerful, shamanistic figure to me then. I was 25, and had just decided to rewrite my novel. I was also writing an account of life under ...”

“... of the promised releases.’ After the Liberation, Picasso – though not a French citizen – took the chair of a Front National des Arts which sent the authorities a list of collaborationists, requesting their arrest and trial. In June 1946, 23 were sanctioned by a purifying tribunal, with Friesz, Vlaminck, Derain and Van Dongen receiving one-year ...”

“... hearthstone’. Strenuously resisting Howells’s characterisation of the aunt even as she took unexpected charge of the plot, Freeman initiated the first of the quarrels that were to trouble the family both within the narrative and outside it. Howells’s letter to the magazine’s editor, Elizabeth Jordan, has not survived, but according to ...”

“... But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very celebrated Autobiography with a similar disclaimer: he had nothing to offer, he said, apart from an account of the origin and growth of his philosophical convictions, and ‘the reader whom these things do not ...”

“... designed and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a wider range of ambiguous ...”

“... imaginary Oxford don. As the letters make clear, he was troubled by the forms of ease his unease took. His detachment always puzzled him. He felt it to be at once a necessity and a self-estranging technique. Being able to be more English than the English while being self-evidently a foreigner put him at an odd angle to himself. When he married Aline Halban ...”

“... reputation is based on a famous trilogy of novels in English, was also worried that writers who took up the colonial language were guilty of a ‘dreadful betrayal’: he was thinking of Leavis’s view, which Ngugi shares, that language is not simply ‘an analogue for a culture’ but its ‘essential life’. Achebe’s approach was to say that the ...”

“... was a thoughtful, inventive television documentary, Becoming Cary Grant, made by Mark Kidel, which took advantage of the archive of home movies shot by Grant over the years, and gave clear proof that he looked at pretty women with the mood of an avid hunter. Mark Glancy was the official consultant on the documentary, having already put in several years’ work ...”

“... Her topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left ...”

“... are used throughout the book) are both dated and revealing. Egyptian resistance took many forms, and the country wasn’t handed independence, but won it in the face of censorship, martial law, and the imprisonment and exile of many of its leaders.Most histories of Egyptology begin in earnest in July 1798, with the arrival at Alexandria of ...”

“... I noted with borrowed eloquence; a terrible blandness has taken over.The road out of Belfast took us through neat suburbs fringed with lawns and gardens. The man with the mortgage, we decided, is rarely the man with the mortar. Belfast calls itself the City of the Titanic, as indeed it was, but it has clearly broken out of the dying North Atlantic ...”

“... us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the ...”

“... of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that was a distinctive feature of the ‘American ...”