“... rural Americans by the Soviet humorists Ilf and Petrov, taken on their ‘American road trip’; young Muscovites gazing lovingly at a giant model of a sprawling skyscraper. Seen as a montage, this array of images has the quality of an Adam Curtis film, a procession of strange, jarring anecdotes set in an exciting and terrifying ultramodern world which now ...”

“... tossed him some meaty bones, which he gnawed loudly, often controversially. In 1989 he disparaged Hugo Young’s biography of Thatcher, in a piece of rhetorical brilliance about the profligacy of Thatcherism. In 1990 he sneered at Raymond Williams as a kindly old fellow from the valleys. In 1999, he savaged an authorised biography of Mandela, creating a ...”

“... fools! They think they have elected a Tory, but of course they have elected a Whig.’ Today’s young historians, while for the most part politically Whig (or SDP, or at least bien-pensant), nonetheless regard the inherited version of English history as a conspiracy wrought by a long line of Whig (and Protestant) writers. Products of a period of national ...”

“... of Johnnie Walker Black Label, smashing his head in and then cutting his throat. Accompanied by a young nephew, he decamps for Bangalore. Of course, Balram knows that his employer’s family will visit vengeance on his. But he doesn’t care. His brothers and their children may be slaughtered, the women of the family may be raped, but he is indifferent. Adiga ...”

“... of motherhood and ‘my inexplicable (to him) decision to reproduce’: ‘I said that having a young child around all the time was like having a houseguest who never said anything and never left.’ She pointed out the guest’s childlike characteristics:[It is] smaller than anyone in the family … has a peculiar appearance … and does not understand ...”

“... of morbid anaesthesia. The self-absorption, the proneness to erotomanic bizarrerie, the display of young doggishness demanding to be loved, the simultaneous apathy towards the feelings of others, are reminiscent of Dylan Thomas, that other priapic show-off descending on London from an Anglo-Celtic metropolis, except that the earlier incarnation seems to have ...”

“... will drive the healthy to sex: soon after Stravinsky died Craft got married – to Stravinsky’s young nurse, an event that is just about noted (in a 1994 postscript). But the book leaves one in no doubt that Craft’s feelings for both Igor and Vera Stravinsky were of painfully acute filial love. ‘They are the most marvellous people in the world ... a ...”

“... neighbours are sometimes apprehensive, they are not participants in its troubles. Even President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (about whom Richard Gott has recently written in the LRB) has done no more than strike an occasional ‘Bolivarian’ populist attitude. Few countries in the last two centuries have been as little involved as Colombia in international ...”

“... allusion. In the library episode of Ulysses, Mr Best does his best to insert an allusion to Victor Hugo into the torrent of Stephen’s Shakespearean speculation: ‘The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L’art d’être grand ... ’ But the title of Hugo’s volume of verse for children is carried away on ...”

“... father has left the room – being there was only ever a prelude to leaving – and I sit alone, a young girl, listening with mounting anxiety to the sound of a Romanian pan flute. This is the music of restless souls – urgent, melancholic skids in a minor key, an unending complaint so depressing at times that one of its greatest exponents, Rezső ...”

“... sawdust if he had. The following day, Alan told Doris that Graves had asked who that attractive young Russian girl was, and what a pity it was that she spoke no English. For weeks I listened intently to the table-talk, not daring to join the conversation, not having anything to say, and wondering where and how one acquired opinions, so many and that seemed ...”

“... in her poetry: it is her craftsmanship that is paid the sincerest compliment in the words of the young poet today. The drama she made of herself goes into the museum of legend, the vivid fictions live on. Alvarez himself rightly forecast the ‘new areas of experience’ which would result from poetry exploring its own sorts of fiction in its own ways. But ...”

“... the mother? Isn’t the mother really just a father, in the end, and the father a mother? Why do young people not think anything? Why are children so unbearable? Is it because of television, or pornography, or comic books? … And women: are they capable of supervising male workers on the same basis as men are? Of thinking like men, of being ...”

“... seductions and vast readership. Even among writers, there may be odd moments of honesty. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who for the best part of 30 years shared a publisher with Zweig, Anton Kippenberg, founder of the Insel Verlag, wrote to dispraise him; when Kippenberg, foolishly trying to change Hofmannsthal’s mind, informed ...”

“... when I was in the North Wing of St Pancras, I was sent to an experimental clinic for the young and depressed, but the clinic sent me back with a letter explaining that I was too disturbed and depressed for them to take me on. So my consultant put me on sleep therapy and every time I woke up, a nurse popped another barbiturate into my mouth, which I ...”