“... 200 billion dollars . . . And we’re paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is ...”

“... to face the world. The sow has fasted for as long as eight months, but that doesn’t stop her young from demanding full access to her remaining reserves.’Didion’s essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, from 1966, is where readers first met Quintana, in the year she was born. ‘Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years ...”

“... in favour of arranging society on Darwinian lines. Not surprisingly, his ideas were popular with Andrew Carnegie and his fellow steel magnates. Konrad Lorenz saw humans as ‘killer apes’, which may have explained his own flirtation with the Nazis. Until recently, the study of animal behaviour was little more than a set of loosely-connected anecdotes. It ...”

“... off a kind of Ready-brek glow, the aura of the consciously high-minded. I remember talking to a young Spaniard heading home after a spell in Sudan. A couple of sheets to the wind, he joked about the reception he expected. ‘You know, in Spain, I’m a saint.’ With his dark beard and gaunt profile – amoebic dysentery, or a giardiasis, perhaps? – he ...”

“... expert in land reclamation who cannot grasp the urgency in any other matter. Miranda’s brother Andrew is an officer in the British Army; and Miranda’s heart is given to a young Republican, a student of philosophy and protégé of her father’s, a boy from a social class lower than her own. An old Nanny is about the ...”

“... Ageing can be avoided, but only at the unacceptable cost of dying young. Otherwise, it is inescapable, and it starts younger than we think. If ageing is defined as the sum of those intrinsic processes in the organism that lead to increased probability of death from natural causes, it begins in our early teens and is continuous thereafter ...”

“... There has recently been the quarrel between Nabokov’s biographers – the publishing rascal Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric records? Did Lawrence Durrell commit incest with his daughter, and if he did should the public know about it? The reluctance of his estate ...”

“... Angelo Morbelli’s In the Rice Fields is a good example of what came of them. A row of young women, skirts hitched up, stand knee-deep in a paddy field. Clothes, skin, the leaves of rice, water and sky, are done in tiny strokes so glossy that the paint glitters – you might think specks of glass had been added to it. Luminosity is indeed ...”

“... the books he wrote about. And when he didn’t like them he enjoyed that too. In 1996 he reviewed Andrew Neil’s memoir of his life and times as ‘a front-line journalist’ (‘front-line journalists usually have a high opinion of themselves but Neil’s self-regard is loud, unique, indestructible’): Add to these anecdotes and quotations Neil’s ...”

“... to the King, carelessly leaves a purse of gold in a cab and has to be reminded that the strange young man who speaks to him is his son. Dumas père gave him a walk-on part in the final episode of his Musketeer saga and turned him into a twittering buffoon. For Barbey d’Aurevilley, he was ‘an amoral moralist, a casual poet of exasperating perfection, as ...”

“... As I drove I could feel her scrutinising me suspiciously: ‘I hope you’re not on drugs, young man.’ I asked her again where she lived. She directed me, with great confidence, into a cul-de-sac, only to declare that this, obviously, wasn’t where she lived. We tried again, with the same result. Impatiently and desperately, I told her I couldn’t ...”

“... he to proselytise. One report has it that he ripped out and sent seven pages of the book to his young sister, Jennifer, just before the bombing. What she told Jennings was that her brother gave her the whole novel to read ‘several years ago’. This is evidently the family line: ‘I know he’s read it, I’ve read it. A lot of people say it’s a racist ...”

“... they stare out at you, some on single monitors, others enlarged, or split-screen, with three young men sitting at a generous console. In his office, McAlister has the same control facilities as they do. ‘Not because I want to sit here in a black polo-neck stroking my cat,’ he said, ‘but because it allows me to do more.’There are 91 street cameras ...”

“... is painstaking in showing the stew of politics and friendship and creativity that surrounded the young Bellow, and because the friends were bookish and often writers – Isaac Rosenfeld, Harold Kaplan, Oscar Tarcov, then Harold Rosenberg, David Bazelon, Herb McClosky, and then the entire New York intellectual clique, Kazin, Howe, Trilling – Leader is able ...”

“... crowd of small boys had gathered around the tape. ‘Give’s a fag,’ said one. ‘You’re too young,’ says I. ‘Am I fuck. I’ve smoked for ages.’ ‘Age are you?’ ‘Nine,’ he says, pulling a ten-pack from his pocket, and lighting one up behind a tiny cupped hand. ‘Same age as Daniel,’ I said. ‘He smoked as well. He used to go out with my ...”