“... like he comes from another world. That isn’t his fault – he does. But it suggests that he may have overstated the extent to which he could stand in for America. Moreover, he shares the tendency of his high-IQ tribe to let his own side off the hook when he wants to. He acknowledges that however well he understood the principles of workplace ...”

“... Diop drew a community of black intellectuals, including African Americans like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, to the offices of Présence Africaine. Andrade was working with Césaire on a new edition of his long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and compiling an anthology of African poetry. In 1956 Diop organised the first Congress of Black Writers ...”

“... of the jubilation surrounding Blair’s arrival in Downing Street, however forced much of that may have been. The election campaign itself was in part responsible for the absence of excitement. Avoiding any sharp challenges or radical commitments, Gerhard Schröder promised no more than a reformist modicum, under the slogan ‘We don’t want to change ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”

“... side. My father advised caution: ‘Best not to have too many illusions; the anti-imperialists may not have been as solid as you think.’ Both my mother and my father broke politically with the family, and became communists. My father was very active in the party, which delayed their wedding a bit. My grandfather refused to allow her to marry a communist ...”

“... is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood ...”

“... the place,’ James wrote, ‘had seemed cruel to the poor little dressmaker outside, it may be believed that it did not strike her as an abode of mercy while she pursued her devious way into the circular shafts of cells … there were walls within walls and galleries on top of galleries; even the daylight lost its colour.’Millbank Prison had ...”

“... under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a ...”

“... were categorised as ‘bourgeois falsifiers’, the most notorious being the American scholar Richard Pipes, known for his anti-Soviet politics (he was later national security adviser on Soviet and East European affairs under Reagan), who got a whole book to himself (Mister Paips falsifitsiruet istoriiu). I was quite critical of American Sovietology ...”

“... using the word ‘needy’, but as a criticism. I was about the neediest person in the world. She may not have known about real psychology, but needy is its Mont Blanc. It must have been awful. As I was reading pretty much the same books, Doris thought I should have learned from them how to behave. It never occurred to her that she hadn’t had any hands-on ...”

“... without faltering, not only at the necessary conditions of political order, discomfiting as these may be to demotic prejudice, but at the far more terrible realities of cosmic disorder: the absence of any divine authority, the delusion of any common morality, the transience of the earth and its species – every insight that religion must deny and society ...”

“... and out of the railways constantly, and spend hours – years – of our lives there. The railways may, as Bradley writes, be ‘a uniquely discrete system: a physically separate domain, its thousands of route-miles fenced off from the rest of the country and ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws’, but you seldom hear ‘I love the railways,’ or ...”

“... did not intend the city’s siege but had ‘bumbled into it’. Commenting on this volte-face, Richard Poirier wrote in Raritan Review that ‘the feelings aroused in Chancellor (and in millions of viewers presumably) by the television footage simply had no place to go outside the programme.’ Far from just changing his mind from one week to the ...”

“... be married to you?!’ Fortunately, a moment of reflection proved that this was not the case. This may turn out to be Philip Roth’s least favourite passage in the book (if and when he reads it), with its proof that Pierpont, however much she admires the humour he sets down on his pages, can’t notate it herself. Nothing more certainly sours a ...”