“... so he later wanted us to believe). In his case, it is not clear which outcome should more properly be regarded as failure: ‘winning’ at Russian roulette could be seen as condemning him to more years of unbearable boredom. A typical character from one of his novels would presumably have put the gun to his head but been ...”

“... magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written. Only too often, such revelations dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience; instead, they suggest that histories ...”

“... World War, my overriding impression was of a man both broad-minded and cosmopolitan; fascinated by the infinite varieties of human nature; surprisingly alert to the influence of women in history, which I’ve always thought of as the subtext, by no means always sexual, of so much public action; appreciative of ...”

“... Part​ of what makes Owen Jones such a phenomenally successful figure by left-of-Labour standards is his ability to be several things at once. He is both insider, reporting back to ‘us’ about what ‘they’ think, and outsider, as shocked and angry about it as ‘we’ might be ...”

“... reviewer said, ‘a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery’. It was to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, as belonging to ‘a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own’. The ...”

“... Eighty years​ have gone by. But there’s still no agreement on how the Spanish Civil War should be remembered. Nor should there be. The real tribute to the force of that human firestorm is the contest of judgments and feelings which still smoulders and still causes pain ...”

“... Foule’ (‘The Crowd’). It wasn’t actually new, having been composed in 1936 in Spanish by Angel Cabral, an Argentinian, using the form of a vals criollo, a dance favoured by the Peruvian working class. Piaf heard it and asked one of her librettists, Michel Rivgauche, to compose new French lyrics. It isn’t hard ...”

“... and I’m part of it,’ he said about the thrill of Hollywood in its heyday; the compulsion to be near the hot centre never left his restless heart. Somehow he was always in the frame, writing his name on the barbarous history of his times. ‘Clancy was here’ was the motive for his writing, as his widow, Janice Tidwell, astutely observes in her ...”

“... unexplained halts in cold places, but forward. Prewar had been better, in ways which couldn’t be recovered (so my own family thought). But somewhere ahead, as the train began again to crawl across the grey plain of the 1950s, there would be warmth, light, undreamed-of gadgets, houses with inside toilets for all, travel ...”

“... cakes, or The Archers. But the serious-minded books about those who ‘know everything’ tend to be about intellectuals, or certain kinds of intellectuals. Everything-knowing depends both on the times in which you live and the position you occupy on the map of knowledge. It’s a commonplace that our culture has become more and more fragmented over ...”

“... as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells us at once of his first reading of the ...”

“... the theatre opening all the doors and windows in the misguided hope that this would curb it. By early afternoon, as Sally Beauman records in her history of the Royal Shakespeare Company, every available fire engine in the county was racing to the scene, including a horse-drawn wagon from Warwick, ‘but their efforts to douse the flames met with little ...”

“... The deaf have been irreversibly granted their own language. Sign languages are now known not to be parasitic on spoken ones, and not to be a form of pantomime, a kind of charades. They do not have anything much like the structure of any spoken language, but they have comparable expressive power. Nor has the breakthrough ...”

“... Union – the flag, the Crown, the Presbyterian Church, and the Army. He became a school cadet, a B Special, an Army marksman and parachutist, showing such outstanding energy and commitment that by the age of 29 he had become the youngest man in the British Army to attain the rank of lieutenant-colonel and routinely acted ...”

“... of public and private schools’, but also from the ‘governors of seven States’, reinforced by an unnumbered throng of ‘businessmen, Congressmen and just plain citizens’. Time’s genius had been to spot the arcane potential in an uncompleted work in six thick volumes which had been gathering dust since their pre-war publication ...”