“... here,’ my father said. ‘You should study the texts. You should know our history. Later you may do as you wish. Even if you reject everything, it’s always better to know what it is that one is rejecting.’ Sensible enough advice, but regarded by me at the time as hypocritical and a betrayal. How often had I heard talk of superstitious idiots, often ...”

“... from the settlement they imposed on it. Wilson, heading the strongest of the winning powers, may have had his flaws, like Tsar Alexander before him, but in Ghervas’s view is entitled to imaginative sympathy. He was no less moved than the tsar by high religious and moral ideals, which in his case found expression in the covenant of a League of Nations ...”

“... was a passion. It was to do with recovering lost worlds from the fragments left to us, and critics may well be right to link this passion to the early deaths of both his parents. It can be life’s greatest blessing to stumble on a vocation whose rhythm fits so nicely with one’s most secret preoccupations. It can also be a curse.Even in Tolkien’s ...”

“... with King Mob and seeing photographs of the thought-bomb graffiti that proliferated in Paris in May 1968. Some of these utopian battle-cries reappeared on the T-shirts designed by McLaren and Vivienne Westwood and sold in their King’s Road boutique. Slogans and recycled Situationist graphics popped up on Sex Pistols record sleeves and promotional ...”

“... but I hope it will help me avoid further mistakes. What worries me most about what I did is that I may have ruined my student’s experience of reading a glowing report which, even as it referred to them, didn’t really refer to them. What does it feel like to read praise that is supposed to be about you but, in the very words it uses for you, reveals that it ...”

“... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...”

“... both the father telling the bedtime story and the child begging him not to leave anything out. He may write short, staccato lines, but he never collapses the distance between characters, they must be depicted as real people, always on the way and never quite arriving. In The Morning Star he hurries along as if he has someone to meet – his ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... worst section of the 2300-seat palais, with the ‘lumpenproletariat of film lovers’. Frémaux may not be a technocrat, but when I asked fellow film critics at Cannes how they would describe him, the most common responses were ‘politician’ and ‘diplomat’. One Australian programmer compared him to ‘a sales rep for Cartier watches’. At the much ...”

“... talk’. In True Nature, his new biography of Matthiessen, Lance Richardson speculates that they may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his ...”

“... has an approval rating of 38 per cent, Bush of 36 per cent, Blair of 30 per cent. Such eminence may seem perverse, but it is not unintelligible. Putin’s authority derives, in the first place, from the contrast with the ruler who made him. From a Western standpoint, Yeltsin’s regime was by no means a failure. By ramming through a more sweeping ...”

“... by a mountain of a man dressed in a jellaba. He tells me to hurry up the stairs – the briefing may already have started. Upstairs is a large room with whitewashed walls and grey carpet tiles. On one of the walls a banner proclaims that there is no God but God. A panel of young, bearded men are sitting under the banner, facing a semi-circular swathe of TV ...”

“... correcting the error. It is striking that the two best-known recent English historians of France, Richard Cobb and Theodore Zeldin, have taken the national penchant for the whimsical and eccentric to extremes, as if so defeated by their subject they had to fall back, in compensation, on a parodic exhibition of French images of Anglicity, as so many ...”

“... reform programme got going, and speculates, plausibly in my view, that the North’s leaders may have been ‘lulled by the evidence of their successes’. In any case, within a very few years North Korea fell irrevocably behind. It happens that Martin and I were each given our first, closely chaperoned tour by the same person – Kim Jong-su. He ...”

“... to Senior Persons carrying out their professional responsibilities in a reckless manner, which may carry a prison sentence.’ This, as it was probably intended to, translated into tabloidese as ‘Jail Bad Bankers.’ These proposals would, I suspect, concentrate the minds of senior bankers if they became law. But that is quite a big ‘if’. Human ...”