“... television and I first suggested it to the BBC in 1975, but without success. Then, early in 1978, Stephen Gilbert commissioned it for a series called ‘The Other Side’, also being made from Pebble Mill, Birmingham. The immediate problem was to dramatise the relationship between Great-grandfather and Maxwell, which is merely reported in the story. It was ...”

“... a philosophical idiom in saying so. Like philosophy, anti-philosophy is for the philosophers. Stephen Toulmin’s work over the past half-century shares sensibilities and rhetorical styles with the later Wittgenstein and (more recently) with Rorty: there’s something wrong with modern academic philosophy (especially the philosophy of morals and of ...”

“... any more, there’s a complete breakdown in the authority of teachers and parents. Children as young as eight, nine and ten are joining gangs, running wild – using the intifada as an excuse.’ Iyyad tells me about a man from a village near Ramallah who was strangled by ‘intifada activists’ only days after being released from an Israeli prison. ‘He ...”

“... famine of 1932-3. The estimates made as long ago as 1946 by Lorimer, and in the Seventies by Stephen Wheatcroft and myself, proved to be too low, but many estimates by Western historians were too high. The present state of our knowledge about these grim consequences of Stalinism is succinctly summarised in Alec Nove’s 14-page chapter in Stalinist ...”

“... a fluster, because the police have just phoned to say a gang of book thieves is on the way and the Stephen Kings are unprotected) says that ‘one can stand in certain parts of Dewsbury and see upwards of sixty mill chimneys at a time.’ My mother’s second husband was a Yorkshireman who had started work at 16, sweeping the floors at a small mill ...”

“... description for A Terrible Country, Keith Gessen’s loosely autobiographical account of a not-so-young Russian-American graduate student’s ambivalent year in Putin’s Russia. The novel’s hero – also named Andrei – is similarly torn. From his home in New York he promises his older brother – who has suddenly fled to London after getting on the wrong ...”

“... education which encouraged his precocious archaeological and linguistic interests. Even as a young schoolboy he was showing a taste for Apocryphal texts: first out of a perverse delight in their obscurity and eccentricity, but soon with a genuine fascination which was to endure, and to make him the leading British scholar in a subject that was a very ...”

“... a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the camera as grimly as Papuan ...”

“... to wring some drama out of Parfit’s delayed transition from his seven-year prize fellowship as a young man at All Souls to a lifelong senior research fellowship, to the point of suggesting in the title of his chapter about it that it amounted to a scandal. But even aficionados of C.P. Snow novels will find the gruel rather thin, since it boils down to the ...”

“... Foster Morris, an ageing English writer who failed to live up to his early promise, in whom the young Naipaul sees ‘the intellectual uncertainty of the unfulfilled writer’, an ‘emotional incompleteness’; a young Venezuelan man whose wife humiliates him by leaving him for a Syrian shopkeeper; the crippled criminals ...”

“... was rung up some years ago by a researcher working on Hugh Dalton’s diaries to ask if I was the young person referred to in Dalton’s account of a Sunday lunch party at Harry Walston’s house at Newton in the early Fifties. Oh yes, I said brightly, and prattled on for several minutes about the pink champagne, the eclectic company (the unsinkable Woodrow ...”

“... At the height of Empire, and of the literature of Empire, J.K. Stephen looked forward to a time When there stands a muzzled stripling,     Mute, beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all ...”

“... Nusrat Raza, a young Pakistani woman, was seen by a passer-by as a ‘great ball of fire coming down the stairs’ of her house. Raza, an asylum seeker who lived in Bradford, had recently been told that the Home Office had refused her claim to stay in the country. At least 221 asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers have died violent deaths in the UK in the past 17 years ...”

“... Ettore Schmitz, then aged 46, in Trieste, there was immediately born the relationship of Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Schmitz was Jewish by birth, German in education and upbringing, Italian in sympathy and by temperament. He had always longed to be a writer, but his early efforts, published at his own expense, earned him no recognition. His own tycoon father ...”

“... Last May Stephen Greenblatt, who was then president of the Modern Languages Association, the literary academic’s equivalent of the Teamsters, circulated a letter among its twenty thousand or so members. ‘Over the last few decades,’ he wrote, ‘most departments of language and literature have come to demand that junior faculty members produce, as a condition for being seriously considered for promotion to tenure, a full-length book published by a reputable press ...”