“... him. Fertile ideas were popping up all over the place in this seedtime of quantum physics. In Paris, in 1923, Louis DeBroglie had put forward the outlandish notion that electrons were both waves and particles. In 1925, Heisenberg began to demonstrate mathematically how this could be possible. By 1926, quantum mechanics, the search for mathematical models ...”

“... entered the First World War. His masters, as he himself acknowledged, were H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw. Even the most ideologically liquored-up combatant in the culture wars of the last couple of decades might blanch at taking them as models. The sobering fact is that, by the time ‘the last intellectuals’ were in their pomp, it was already too ...”

“... as a ‘toucher’ and a man who used to ‘bum off people’. Then he went on: ‘I met him in Paris several times. He was a morose, completely self-contained little man. I was curious about him. I admired certain aspects of his work.’ He told another interviewer that he had letters from Joyce, ‘who asked me some years ago to make some confidential ...”

“... this volume – which is something like an extended pamphlet, on the order, as he says himself, of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Idéologie française – but rather his more comprehensive Marxism and the French Left (1986), which sets out to tell this story from the 19th century to the present, and not merely, as Khilnani frames it in his book, from the Liberation ...”

“... Klaus Kinski really is a daft actor.’ No one ever used the word ‘daft’ so compellingly. Bernard Jacobson (gallery-owner): Karel wasn’t a collector like you hear about. I always felt the whole thing melded into one: his love of ancient art; ceramics, modern and contemporary art; pickled herring and bagels and smoked salmon and cream cheese with ...”

“... for a calculating machine. He later became a corresponding member of the Académie Royale in Paris and first president of the Societät der Wissenschaften in Berlin, and when he obtained salaried work at the Hanoverian court at the age of 30, he took it for granted that he would continue to pursue his vocation as a universal intellectual and perpetual ...”

“... down. Yours, James Prendergast.’ He puts this into an envelope addressed ‘Mr Georges Bidault, Paris, France’, and pops it in the post. A few days later (Benny now departed), there is a knock at the door. My father, alone in the flat, opens the door. A Special Branch officer asks him if he is James Prendergast and if he wrote the letter the officer shows ...”

“... On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt ...”

“... United States, sped through the icy North Atlantic while dining as if in the finest restaurant in Paris. Lords of the universe. Within a few hours most were dead. We know a great deal about the glitterati on the doomed liner and the stories are both absurdly delicious and irresistibly sad. Mahala Douglas, wife of the Quaker Oats heir, sat at the table where ...”

“... in Other Passports. They are all formal verse and one of them, ‘To Pete Atkin: Letter from Paris’, was his initial attempt at ottava rima, the stanza chosen later for his extended verse diaries. In a letter slightly earlier than the one to Atkin, he sets out what by then had become, and was to remain for many years, his creed. Interestingly, this ...”

“... in her essay, ‘Am I a Snob?’ In the discussion session which followed Williams’s paper, Bernard Sharratt remarked that although the Godwin circle had been repressed it nonetheless had had an influence on Hazlitt, whose critique of Malthus and Ricardo suggested an ‘alternative direction’ that could have been developed further. The Pre-Raphaelites ...”

“... remarks like ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules,’ made by people like George Bernard Shaw. The Yale Book lists these under the names of their authors, along with brief indications of their provenance and reliability. Books of quotations are no longer sources of things you might want to say or cite – after all, you can Google and copy ...”

“... press lords such as Rothermere and Beaverbrook and writers such as Wyndham Lewis and George Bernard Shaw. As late as 1968, the lugubrious Cecil King, Rothermere’s nephew and then boss of the Mirror Group, planned to install Mosley as the head of a military-backed government, with Mountbatten as his second choice. For short-term tactical ...”

“... potent contempt than in Houellebecq’s letter on his mother in Public Enemies, an exchange with Bernard-Henri Lévy? He never felt greater disgust for this ‘absolutely self-centred creature’, he says, than when she told him, on one of perhaps 15 encounters between mother and son, that his former nanny had asked after him: ‘She thought it was ...”

“... his paragraph on Iran to mock ‘fashionable’ supporters of the Islamist upsurge in London and Paris, but didn’t bring up the Anglo-American coup against Mossadegh in 1953 or the American mollycoddling of the shah. He wrote about the collaboration between the Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq and the Saudi Islamists, but left out the middleman in the ...”