“... the system. A few weeks after I first met Andy and Martha, I visited Michael at his home in North-West London. He showed me a letter sent by the Ministry of Defence to his late mother, Mary, in 2011 and signed by the defence secretary at the time, Liam Fox. ‘I apologise for Majella’s death and offer you my heartfelt sympathy,’ it reads. ‘On ...”

“... connecting the dispersed groups of Jews in Russia, Germany, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, who otherwise had virtually nothing in common. Secularisation was therefore a threat to Jewish identity in a way unlike that for any ordinary nation. Zionist nationalism was hostile to the passive ghetto outlook of Orthodox Judaism, yet fear of ...”

“... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...”

“... punishment in 1846, well before most of Europe; Rhode Island and Wisconsin got rid of it in 1853; North Dakota has never had it; sometimes a bit behind: seven out of nine states that had abandoned it embraced it again in the decades after the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution; sometimes – as in its tacit acceptance of lynching and of the quasi-judicial ...”

“... It was the old city of the criollos that his mother had known, and the area around Palermo in the north of the city, down on its luck, where his father built a house beside Fanny Haslam’s house and where Jorge Luis and his sister, Norah, were brought up. Close to Palermo was open countryside. A city both half imagined and half built (‘Only one thing was ...”

“... Cuba – like hundreds of other rebels, adventurers, mountebanks and discontents from Europe and North and South America – by the flame of Revolution.It took twenty-four hours to fly to Cuba from Europe in those days, the Iberia Viscount touching down on all the islands in the mid-Atlantic on the way. I had two volumes of the collected works of Thomas ...”

“... gathering in the mid-1930s – this final section of the novel is called ‘Present Day’ – North, the now grown-up grandson of Colonel Pargiter, watches as people inquire after each other’s children: My boy – my girl … they were saying. But they’re not interested in other people’s children, he observed. Only in their own; their own ...”

“... Oxford who caused him concern’: he believed him to be his illegitimate brother. Her grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had, in the 1830s, ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens’ and run ‘naked in the sight of some nursemaids’, thus losing the opportunity to become solicitor-general. He ‘was forced to retire from political and legal work for four ...”

“... this was company she aspired to join. She pursued her ambition with fervour: graduation from North Hollywood High School at the age of 15, a degree from the University of Chicago, graduate study and a Master of Arts at Harvard, a fellowship at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she attended lectures by Isaiah Berlin and had classes with A.J. Ayer, Stuart ...”

“... Rot’ school of penology on this side of the Atlantic. With ideological encouragement from North America, the support of his Prime Minister and the acquiescence of the Labour Party, he has reinvigorated the arguments for the coercive and punitive aspects of sentencing, and made good his promise to Tory delegates not to flinch from sending people to ...”

“... Ginsberg ever proved to be. There were, for example, the soon-to-be-distinguished poet and scholar John Hollander, the critic Steven Marcus, and Jason Epstein, destined to become a force in New York publishing. None of these was to figure in his career with the importance of Lionel Trilling. The two first met when, in his senior year, Podhoretz enrolled in ...”

“... poems, in ‘Preludes’, for example, or ‘Portrait of a Lady’, ‘First Caprice in North Cambridge’, and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. He had decided he must stay in London, there to launch his career as a poet. This was the course recommended by his new friend and admirer Ezra Pound, to whom he had shown some of his ...”

“... person, once launched on adult life? Spurling observes of the biography he produced after the war, John Aubrey and His Friends, that ‘for all the author’s evident respect and affection, its subject never comes to life as Aubrey makes his own subjects do.’ How far can the same be said of her account of him? Good-natured, amusing, affable, to many he also ...”

“... it is permitted to feel that the future holds nothing good for either side. Fredric Jameson North Carolina One of the 20th century’s least celebrated discoveries was that terrorism works. The Irish led the way: Britain retired from the field in 1922 not because it had been militarily defeated but because it couldn’t stomach endless terrorist ...”

“... feed seven and, soon, nine or ten billion people. Most of this population is poor by European or North American standards and doesn’t constitute any automatic constituency for ecological restraint. Governments and corporations, for their part, have little incentive to slow, much less stop the general destruction. The collective activity of humanity is ...”