“... home of his conquests, doubtless imaginary. (Ferris omits, or perhaps never came across, a much more interesting claim belonging to this sojourn: Wheldon once told me that he had been allowed to join the local Hitler Youth.) As a student at LSE, then in a variety of jobs he didn’t suit, finally in the Army – where he got on famously – he had a number ...”

“... The only other really appealing possibility was a monomaniacal plan of the Victorian architect, Thomas Willson, who in 1842 designed a brick and granite sepulchral pyramid with a base area the size of Russell Square to be built on Primrose Hill. Its 94 levels (topped by an observatory) would be ‘sufficiently capacious to receive five millions of the ...”

“... Arabesques is not an autobiography, a straightforward life, at all, but something far sneakier and more complicated: a counterlife, with fiction and fact constantly ducking and weaving around each other. As in Philip Roth’s novel of that name, moments that look like intimate revelations are shown to be virtuoso displays of formalist trickery, and vice ...”

“... history, if by the truth we mean correspondence with empirical reality. The authors of the more lurid travellers’ tales would have been taken aback if someone had described them in modern vernacular as ‘bloody liars’, but so they were, many of them. They were telling stories, and wanted to tell good stories. Aristotle’s conception of poetic ...”

“... In March 1932​ , Thomas Mann visited Weimar in central Germany. For the last thirty years of the 18th century, this modestly sized town was home to Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, but by the 1930s it had become a hotbed of the radical right. ‘The admixture of Hitlerism and Goethe affects one strangely,’ Mann wrote in ‘Meine Goethereise ...”

“... conscientious diligence, now referring rather to the institutions of manufacture; and ‘art’, more narrowly defined as imaginative creation in place of its prior meaning of human skill in general. Arts and crafts were semantically parted, labour understood through its role in manufacture. Not one of the Lunar men appeared in Williams’s pages, though he ...”

“... male on his way to the public house were not, as might be supposed, harpies eager to lure him into more vicious courses. They were Salvationist ‘exhorters’ intent on waking the dull clod to dreams of heaven. In the words of the War Cry, they ‘would arrest his attention, and talk to him, one on one side, and another on the other, thus keeping up a ...”

“... be modified by its immediate environment – in this case, soil pH. Many other instances are even more striking. The spine of the translucent water flea Daphnia shortens and ultimately disappears if it is bred for generations in polluted water, only for the long spines to reappear in the offspring of spineless Daphnia removed to clean water. There are ...”

“... be perplexed by the drama but in the end reassured that his own diagnosis is correct: we need more honest discussion of our differences. Graff sounds very much like John, who, in his losing battle to save his skin, insists to Carol: ‘I don’t know that I can teach you about education. But I know that I can tell you what I think about education, and ...”

“... a decisive historical event be commemorated? In the history of the British Isles no event has been more decisive than the Revolution of 1688. It defeated a vigorous attempt to impose royal absolutism, and secured the principle of Parliamentary consent. It made possible the emergence of free speech and of an independent judiciary. It was the critical episode in ...”

“... of a great good place to write. Friends and acquaintances pop up for a paragraph and drop out: Thomas Wolfe, Gary Cooper, millionaire sportsmen – a parade of guests at Key West who booze, fish, admire the great man and leave. To Reynolds’s Hemingway nothing really mattered except writing well. Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa are read ...”

“... Mayfair Estate came into the Grosvenor family through an advantageous marriage in 1677 between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and the heiress Mary Davies, who also brought with her other London lands which later became Pimlico and Belgravia. Enjoying enormous natural advantages of location, from which indifferent early management could not detract, Mayfair was developed ...”

“... tradition celebrating self-sufficient travel, dating back to Lao Tzu’s aphorisms (the journey as more important than the destination) and medieval pilgrimage. Another milestone was the embrace of the bicycle in the 19th century, which for the first time made independent travel possible for millions of working people. The earliest known written account of ...”

“... find his work cool, elegant, witty, zeitgeisty, disturbing, humane and maybe deep. Those who care more about the words than the visuals, however, will tend towards the sniffy. They will find Coupland shallow, trendy, incoherent, sentimental, kitsch. As usual, there’s truth on both sides. Coupland (born in 1961 on a West German airbase; moved to Vancouver in ...”

“... years in a succession of mental hospitals, ‘she is told: “Your delusion is total, and all the more dangerous and incurable in that you speak just like a person who is fully in possession of her reason.”’ The situation is no less Kafkaesque a century later. ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’, published in a 1973 issue of the journal ...”