“... tone that he would satirise more than forty years later in The Ambassadors: ‘I think that if we are to live in America it is about time we boys should take up our abode there; the more I see of this estrangement of American youngsters from the land of their birth, the less I believe in it. It should also be the land of ...”

“... have, I imagine, met those specifications. But the one who comes first to an American’s mind is John Dewey: a man whose engagement in primary and higher education, and whose active participation in politics, were considerably more extensive than Russell’s – and, I should argue, more focused, intelligent and useful. Dewey was the most prominent ...”

“... according to his younger brother, Quentin,there was a meal at Charleston eaten by Vanessa, we three children and, I think, Duncan. Vanessa served a pudding; she gave half to Julian, the rest of us divided what remained. Vanessa herself realised that there was something more than a little absurd about this method of displaying affection and said ...”

“... which led some to gravitate toward the fringes of American society both left and right. John Rambo, for his part, did both. In First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s character is a ‘half-German, half-Indian’ veteran, traumatised by the war, who arrives in a small town to pay his respects to a black comrade killed by exposure to Agent ...”

“... United States, mixing fictional with historical characters (‘What the real people say and do,’ we are told in an afterword to The Golden Age, ‘is essentially what they have been recorded as saying and doing, while the invented characters are then able to speculate on motivation’). To depict the domestic politics, foreign policy, social ...”

“... a story about Earl Haig at Durham Cathedral. The Field Marshal was being shown round by the dean when they paused at the tomb of the Venerable Bede. Haig regarded it thoughtfully for a moment, then said: ‘Of course. Bede. Now he was a woman, wasn’t he?’ It’s a good example of scrambled memory, but the laborious explanations that I had to go into ...”

“... When interviewed by the Observer Colonel Morgan placed the calumny in its true context: ‘We really have to put the record straight,’ he concluded after a precise rebuttal. ‘Especially as this man clearly has considerable influence.’ ‘This man’ is another name for a congenital liar. He says so himself – in so many words. Perhaps Colonel ...”

“... have been dug, linking the Great Western line at Paddington to the Great Eastern at Whitechapel. We’ll have spent £15 billion, we’ll have seven new London train stations, and we’ll finally be able to travel from Essex or Greenwich to Berkshire or Heathrow, via Central ...”

“... in Hannibal, he was twice arrested for stealing food, he died of cholera about 1889. So far as we know, Blankenship never escaped down the Mississippi with a runaway slave but we know he was the kind of boy who would have sprung to do it. Did he not acknowledge, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that Jim ‘had an ...”

“... of them is intolerable. Lies, whispered, of friends’ indiscretions; instances of envy – when we hate the people we love; peccadillos; filched office supplies; inflated expense accounts; violent obsessions of all kinds; reckless speeding; a fender bender whose scene we left; the belt ...”

“... scenes, but the work still had to be done of identifying the truly great plays. By the same token, we can all have very clear ideas of what are the great scenes in cinema – and they’re innumerable, of course – and what are the great moments – the equivalents of the great lines – usually moments of kissing or killing or recognition. But ...”

“... from Shils’s amusingly unself-conscious, Cold War-imperial foundational essay: The categories we employ are the same as the ones we employ in our studies of our own societies, and they postulate the fundamental affinities of all human beings. Their persistent application in research and the diffusion of the results of ...”

“... machine, the doctors gently told me that the case was almost certainly hopeless and asked if we would agree to the machine being switched off. Mollie, distraught beyond description, left the decision to me. I hope never to be confronted with another like it. There was a degree of mystery as to the cause of his accident. The most likely explanation was ...”

“... the kerb of conservativism. He says at one point that marriage is ‘part of the huge price we pay to control the male sex’. Admittedly, this is a throwaway remark made in the course of defending his decision to bring up his three children as a single father – rare now, even rarer in the 1960s. But you don’t need to be Andrea Dworkin to see ...”

“... I am interested in the act, in the explosion, and in the entire aftermath of that. What do we do after this? Do we beat up the guy who stabbed the woman? Do we separate them? Do we call the cops? Do we ask for ...”