“... found the word ‘death’ unsayable, and got round it by saying, of someone whose corpse lay in the next room, that ‘something had happened.’ ‘If anything ever happens to me,’ my mother would say, ‘you’ll find the Liverpool Assurance policy book in the cupboard up above the stock cubes.’ ‘If something happens to me,’ my grandmother ...”

“... taught me to read in the summer of 1945, between VE Day and VJ Day, when I was turning three. Time lay on her hands: my father, a major in the Territorials, was away in Palestine, battling Irgun and the Stern Gang in the latter days of the British Mandate, and wasn’t due to be demobilised from the army until the end of the year; and I was a pushover for her ...”

“... an enthusiastic feminist arguing that her greatest failure – her greatest irresponsibility – lay in her refusal to do anything to help the cause of women, and especially (of course) 20th-century women. Elizabeth can be fairly criticised – and was, by contemporaries, particularly her worried ministers and faithful Commons – for her failure to look to ...”

“... seeks to ease the passions stirred up by his stormy career. He could equally well have followed Paul Rule, the other contemporary expert on Foucquet’s rich (and largely unpublished) manuscript legacy, whose judgment on Foucquet is markedly less sympathetic: as a Jesuit (and Rule was trained as one himself) Foucquet was exceptionally disobedient, with a ...”

“... The second episode also ends in suicide, and tells of Sebald’s own schoolteacher in the Fifties, Paul Bereyter. Although only one-quarter Jewish, Bereyter was expelled from his first job in a German primary school in 1935: over the next few months his father died (terrorised by pogroms in his native town of Gunzenhausen), the family business was ...”

“... some the only proper receptacle of knowledge about this noble organ. Thus we come to 1860, and to Paul Broca, who in these pages emerges as a faintly flawed giant on the track of hemispheric differentiation. Initially, though, it is a differentiation between front and back, rather than left and right. Broca, a Huguenot, was predisposed to localisation of ...”

“... and idiosyncratic. Many of the papers had been written in the 1930s but this was the first the lay public had seen of them. For some the Ecrits were instantly a cult, to others they were, and remain, largely an outrage. They form a large volume of considerable obscurity. Freud here seems to have been rewritten by Mallarmé, and the majestic, authoritative ...”

“... he launched his new journal, the Banker, in 1926, and recruited to it such financial experts as Paul Einzig. Two years later, he persuaded Eyre and Spottis-woode to purchase a newspaper group that included the Economist, the Investors Chronicle and the Financial News as well. Long before his 30th year, he was established as a wealthy and successful ...”

“... with Britten. The stickiness – clearly a source of great amusement to Coldstream and Spender – lay in the tensions between the lifestyles of the people concerned, and the frustration felt by Auden and Isherwood – naturally dominant upholders of that lifestyle – in the presence of those who did not take it on their terms. ‘Benjamin does not like ...”

“... fail, without difficulty, wherever, however’: but she is so lonely and angry that very soon ‘I lay in Eugene’s arms between the pink sheets waiting to feel guilty,’ When she doesn’t feel guilty, it is a revelation to her. Next day she arranges two months’ leave from her job with the British Council, buys a set of red luggage (because it is ...”

“... all-night discussion with a friend transformed Bernal’s life; it was like the conversion of St Paul. ‘This socialism was a marvellous thing ... The theory of Marxism, the great Russian experiment, what we could do here and now, it was all so clear, so compelling, so universal ... It would bring the Scientific World State.’ That state’s creation ...”

“... into full-scale national rebellion. Jesus was not a zealot like that, because such zealotry lay in the future. Given this necessary qualification, does Aslan make his case for Jesus being on the militant end of the earlier zealous frame of mind? One piece of evidence worth considering is Jesus’ interesting reply, variously recounted in three Gospel ...”

“... and pushed aside. The exposed flesh is teased free, and his face is ‘flapped downwards, to lay on the tray mounted across his throat and chest. Like a baby’s bib! it appeared suddenly to Behringer.’ Lethem handles this section exceptionally well, combining deeply researched detail with spooky dread. Other brain surgeons, we learn, are horrified by ...”

“... private school accent (he and my grandfather were born and brought up in London, and went to St Paul’s) Robin describes the events of a May night and morning near the plantation where he was assistant manager in Kodanad, high in the mountains in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. The previous night a leopard had killed a bullock belonging to one of the ...”

“... It used to be said in Whitehall that the first job of a royal commission was to lay down a decent cellar. Royal commissions were grand affairs, the Rolls Royces of public deliberation, with a pedigree almost a thousand years long. Some four hundred of them were set up during the 19th century, and almost a hundred and forty in the first three-quarters of this century ...”