“... back ‘in the Old Country’. ‘I forget which one exactly,’ he says. A memory flash shows a young Grampa on a boat where everyone has an Irish accent mixed with something that might be Polish. But the subtlest and funniest joke in the episode, the one that best sums up all the hypocrisy thriving then and now on the subject of immigration and therefore ...”

“... old, gendered dreams represented by the dolls. When Robbie on her journey approaches a group of young girls, she simpers and smiles in the way she thinks she is supposed to, and the girls are horrified. They left such dolls behind long ago. One of them calls Robbie a fascist. Again, Robbie should probably not know what this means. But she does, and is ...”

“... aristocratic, always about the business of raising himself and hiding himself, and, from a young age, brilliantly observing Britain from the top of his nose and the summit of Parnassus. From Blackpool in 1942: The best thing about this place is the potted shrimps one can buy for succour between performances! Not really a holiday attraction, of ...”

“... By my count​ , of the 37 photographs of Michael Ovitz in this book there are 19 in which his mouth stays shut – while he’s smiling. That isn’t intended as a hostile remark. His mouth stayed closed when he smiled because he was concentrating. You may not have heard of him, but for maybe a decade and a half starting in the mid-1970s no one in the motion picture business was more focused than Michael Ovitz ...”

“... of a priest in Riazan, a provincial city almost two hundred kilometres south-east of Moscow, the young Ivan Petrovich seemed destined for the cloth. The only sure path for advancement for Ivan and his brothers was to enrol at the Riazan theological school, and then to attend the local theological seminary. A truly gifted student might later go to the ...”

“... valley; eating sandwiches and drinking beer out of bottles on the pre-dawn commuter train. A young medical student is ordered to make notes on a local painter and madman, a fellow by the name of Strauch. Strauch has the honour of being the first precipitation in fiction of the typical Bernhard bravado and nihilism and savagery. With his intellect and ...”

“... to General John Harding (of whose XIII Corps in Venezia Giulia pars minor fui), trying to stop young idiots like myself from starting a Third World War. Thus although he missed the early, heroic years of the resistance, he was ideally placed to observe, both in the field and at headquarters, the growing self-confidence of the Partisans, the increasing ...”

“... cinematic descent into hell. They even agreed on the incredible proposition that the imaginary young patient – Cecily – should be played by Marilyn Monroe. Sartre apparently thought she was the greatest actress in the world. Not least, they agreed on the money: $25,000 was to be Sartre’s fee. That was about all they agreed on. Huston wanted a ...”

“... as though the fearless child had been chosen to succeed the naked and discredited Emperor (the young Handke first came to attention by his attacks on the Gruppe 47). A logical choice, perhaps. Handke has remained visibly true to himself: tall and lean and unhappy-looking; the glasses, the moustache, the dark clothes; the astonishing rate of output and the ...”

“... 1999, we read sentences like these: ‘In this city the old women dress like adolescents and the young women like old women, because this way they get each other’s jobs’; ‘I was very happy in his arms, especially when I thought of all the films we would see together.’ The thing would be to distinguish this posture, if we can, from simple denial of ...”

“... declaring a fervent desire to do the same thing to the Senate. The historian Cassius Dio, then a young man, was there and recalls that he and his senatorial peers were torn between laughter and terror, knowing the emperor happily murdered those who displeased him. Eventually, after 11 years of burgeoning madness, Commodus was himself murdered. The prefect of ...”

“... isolation and emptiness, a space where new and old selves can be found and lost. Alex Darken is a young poet whose marriage has broken up, and who has borrowed a cottage in Norfolk in which to lick his wounds. He meets a burnt-out older poet and his young American mistress, and the foreseeable passions and conflicts ...”

“... has dinner with a couple from another story (about the husband discovering the corpse of a young woman), and in yet another story he treats a child who has been hit by a car. The child’s parents are the neighbours of an aging jazz singer and her difficult, cello-playing daughter. Both families have their pool cleaned by a character in another story ...”

“... or divine mercy in it, the pure element, neither land nor shipping, nor anything else. Couples, young, old, male, female, mixed – the parallels that meet at infinity. A group of conspiratorial individuals, heavily bearded and hatted, exclusionary, farmers or Russians or uncles. Sketches from café life or the pleasure factories of Weimar. Orgiastic ...”

“... of fable, discreetly foreshadowed in the first pages of the book. Frédéric and a friend, when young, visited a brothel in their native town, but they were not able to enjoy its pleasures because Frédéric got scared and ran off. His friend had to leave, too, because Frédéric had the money. The last words of the novel describe a late conversation ...”