“... of these critics, but the realisation that writers like Conrad and Kipling, or Jane Austen and John Stuart Mill, thought and wrote without the natives in mind as an audience. An Indian or Jamaican woman reading Kim or Jane Eyre was able to bring to light the usually unstated colonial and male-dominated ideological assumptions behind the form of the novel ...”

“... a hundred years before Parliament paid out about five times that amount to the ‘lone genius’ John Harrison in 1773 for the magnificent marine chronometer that provided a working solution to the longitude problem. The patent Hooke wanted was a type of ‘Letters Patent’ – literally ‘open letters’, sealed but not sealed up, conferring the special ...”

“... was a Bible-banging fundamentalist. When officials in Dayton, Tennessee decided to roast John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, they called in the ageing Bryan to prosecute. The week-long trial became a national sensation and reached its climax when the defence attorney, Clarence Darrow, called Bryan to the stand and eviscerated his Biblical ...”

“... blouse and ‘willow-green’ slacks – two colours Matisse liked very much. It worked: Matisse took an immediate liking to Gilot, whose eyebrows reminded him of ‘circumflex accents’, and he declared that he would like to make a portrait of her with green hair. This rattled Picasso, who was so proprietary he once suggested Gilot wear a scarf covering ...”

“... once, to cooking for himself at his $400-a-night cabana at the Chateau Marmont. ‘Cooking crack took practice, but it wasn’t rocket science,’ he writes. ‘I became absurdly good at it – guess that 172 on my LSAT counted for something.’ The tension in Biden’s memoir is between the high-achieving politician’s son and the chronic alcoholic and ...”

“... happening.’ By 10 p.m. Trump was convinced he had triumphed, with plenty to spare. At 10.30 he took a call from Karl Rove, former election guru to George W. Bush, congratulating him on his win. This sealed his mind against all remaining doubt. As Wolff writes: ‘Why would Rove – a man as in with the Beltway Republican establishment as anybody, who ...”

“... house through his reputation as a philosophical virtuoso, and they still valued his opinions and took pleasure in having him at their elbow as a personal ‘living dictionary’. He distinguished himself from other men of letters, moreover, by keeping himself clean and sweet-smelling and retaining a wistful sense of humour. ‘I have never,’ he ...”

“... the TV pictures of the doomed publicity stunt undertaken by the former Minister of Agriculture, John Gummer, showing his attempt to force his daughter Cordelia to eat an over-hot burger and her wise, peremptory rejection of it. Reflect on the work of the American scientist Carleton Gajdusek, who showed the relationship between cannibalism in Papua New ...”

“... painting much, if at all.’ In 1967 she decided the BBC job was ‘too time-consuming’ and took a job at New York’s first ever head shop instead.One night, on the way home to her apartment in St Mark’s Place (four rooms for $67 a month!), she dropped by the Balloon Farm, where she witnessed the Velvet Underground performing its Exploding Plastic ...”

“... not for pigs, or chickens): why would they ban it if there really was nothing to fear? The public took the hint, and began to waver in its passion for beef, and especially beefburgers, which, of course, include bits of dead cow you’d just as soon not know about. Ministers went on making soothing statements. The Agriculture Secretary, then ...”

“... I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been. If you took Pope seriously as to the degree of fidelity required of a translator of Homer (‘to copy him in all the variations of his style and the different modulations of his numbers ... not to neglect even the little figures and turns on the words, nor sometimes the ...”

“... Thomas’s notion was that if you looked after the sound it didn’t matter whether the sense took care of itself; that it was possible to write great poems without worrying too much what they meant. The pleasure one gets from a Thomas poem has nothing to do with the pleasure of working it out or even the sense that one day one will be able to work it ...”

“... famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale famine in India took place under British rule in Bengal in 1943, exacerbated by Churchill’s insistence that the grain must go to the troops and not to the people who grew it. Tharoor quotes Amartya Sen’s memorable dictum that there has never been a famine in a democracy with ...”

“... it: Everybody in South Carolina knew that blacks, for reasons unknown, fancied clay … The eating took place in a bedroom, for the galvanised bucket of clay was kept under the bed, for the cool. It was blue clay from a creek, the consistency of slightly gritty ice cream. It lay smooth and delicious-looking in its pail of clear water. You scooped it out and ...”

“... cloak) he would preach vigorously.’ (He also loved a game called mesmerism, in which he took the part of the victim.) Cummie almost certainly provoked the terrors that only she could soothe, but Louis was addicted like a Covenanter to her hellfire images, and without her care felt that he might have died in Heriot Row. ‘How well I remember her ...”