“... noted that Poussin had the ‘most prized gifts of intelligence’. A few years later, the Comte de Brienne said of him that he ‘was endowed with a great deal of reason and a fine mind, a lively and strong imagination, a very accurate memory and very sound judgment, coupled with natural good sense’. By the end of the 18th century the artist had picked up ...”

“... The​ old man told my French nephew that he had something special to show him. Something he had thought best to keep in a drawer since 1943. In that village, families at Christmas decorate their crib with santons – figurines of the Holy Family, the three kings, the shepherds, an angel. But the old man was holding out an extra santon ...”

“... better advantage. He suggested, not entirely in passing, that some of the artefacts in the Musée de l’homme should be housed at the Louvre. The idea, which he’d borrowed from the eccentric collector Jacques Kerchache, left the Louvre in turmoil. It also put the social scientists at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the keepers of the Musée ...”

“... mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky. During his schooldays in Monaco he was known as Cointreau-Whisky, and his poetry includes characters with equally peculiar monikers – Rotsoge, Madame Salmajour, Monsieur Panado, Herr Traum, Frau Sorge, Lul ...”

“... contradictions, but manages to extract from them a remarkably coherent image of a principled man who embraced constitutionalism when it still smelled of the guillotine, who gave constitutions to Finland, Poland and France, and who sought to ensure the survival of constitutional systems all over post-Napoleonic Europe – but who ultimately failed his ...”

“... an Englishwoman being publicly flogged in a foreign country for performing the sexual act with a man other than her husband raises a variety of responses: prurient curiosity, patriotic outrage, feminist fury and possibly even a shred of genuine sympathy. Hopes that the Foreign Office would obtain leniency for the Arnots were blighted when ITV ...”

“... of the timid Cambridge student who falls in love with the subject of his thesis – French writer Paul Michel, a malign blend of Dany Cohn-Bendit and Guy Hocquenghem – and carries him off from an asylum, struck me above all as daring to be improbable. Not because this couldn’t happen, nor because of any objection to the post-psychological and ...”

“... cormorants are used by the Chinese for fishing), but because in rationalising another culture it de-naturalises our own. When Chase writes, in one of the many newspaper articles An Insular Possession reproduces, that the Chinese language has no tenses and the Chinese sense of time is circular, he is contributing to a tradition that will eventually undermine ...”

“... What is more, you can brush aside the books of the people influenced by Heidegger – Derrida, de Man, Foucault – as just more of the same discredited claptrap. Heidegger himself specialised in this sort of quick dismissal. Like Nietzsche, who claimed that his sense of smell told him whether or not a book was worth thinking about, Heidegger claimed ...”

“... are. Realism can refer to the representational mode of an art form, or to its cognitive effect. Paul Murray quotes me in this book as claiming that the Irish literary tradition is one of ‘largely non-realistic works’, whereas what I actually wrote was ‘non-realist’. ‘Realistic’ is a value term, whereas ‘realist’ is not, or not ...”

“... dourly of the first that it is part of a general British tendency to see Chaucer as a university man, or at least a properly-educated one (the vanished record would have made him an inmate of the Inns of Court). De mortuis restrains him from saying much about the second, beyond the occasional blank denial: ‘there is no ...”

“... Salisbury, Rhodesia, published a poem of mine and then some of my dispatches, written under a nom de plume, describing the political upheaval in Malawi. I had also been writing fiction, but it wasn’t until a few years later that I finished a novel. I was then a teacher in Uganda and had still never met a real novelist. In both Malawi and Uganda I ...”

“... 34 years later, when a travel guide to Italy was published in Paris as the work of ‘M. de Stendhal, officier de cavalerie’. Had that pseudonymous cavalry officer, Beyle in real life, perished in the retreat from Moscow, as statistically he should have done – the chances of getting back safely were little more ...”

“... of propaganda, the personification of betrayal and, according to the popular press, the most hated man in the country. MI5 judged that his acquittal would cause ‘a public outcry’, but, awkwardly for the government, Joyce wasn’t a British subject and never had been. He was born in Brooklyn to an Irish father and English mother who had become American ...”

“... was only Wilbur who had what he called the ‘disease’, the ‘belief that flight is possible to man’. He spent much of 1899, when he was 32, steeping himself in the literature of aeronautics; he scrutinised the flight patterns of hawks, buzzards and pigeons; he assembled and flew kites. And, on a drawing board in the spare room of the family shop, he ...”