“... the Midwest. In June, Harry would arrive in his chauffeur-driven Lincoln to collect his sons. ‘May you come home in your coffin,’ Rose called after them. Harry showered the boys with gifts; they dined in the best restaurants and watched baseball at Wrigley Field, where he had a private box. In 1929, Schwartz’s father gave him a Chrysler Imperial. The ...”

“... been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And she gave us handouts of Heinrich von Kleist’s inexhaustibly spiralling ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, photocopied from the TLS. I studied with Gillian for a year, we corresponded and met up sometimes in the 1990s, but I ...”

“... a bunch of overgrown kids playing at dressing up – which was, in its way, even more alluring. We may be different, they seemed to be saying, but we’re also just like you. As well as the familiar ambiguities of gender and sexuality, in the best of the Ziggy songs Bowie channels both the extraterrestrial superstar and the crooked-toothed boy from Bromley: he ...”

“... many visits . . . have I found anyone about.’ The fact is, in Sebald nobody is ever about. This may be poetic but it seems to me a short cut to significance. 6 April, Yorkshire. The new organic shop in the village continues to do well, the walk down the lane to the Nissen hut always a pleasure even in the bitterest weather. There are sheep in the adjoining ...”

“... what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity. You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings, you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less ...”

“... you, to ease the burden of the present, and I in the knowledge that no matter how bleak the moment may be, how futile or helpless it may seem, nothing can prevent our love, nothing can ever come between us.Where another writer might have chosen a more explicitly religious word, like the ‘hereafter’ or the ...”

“... and Fury, about the pundit class in Washington, Safire conceded that ‘yes, psychologically, he may have been seeking to minimise the relative importance of the crimes committed by his former boss, with this silliness.’ So now I’ve stopped ‘gating’ and will never try it again, however tempting the locution. As both these books in quite different ...”

“... Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series of maternal ...”

“... look spineless in the face of Serb and Croat terror, has produced a subsidiary institution which may be the most important legacy of the war. In one way this is history repeating itself, for in 1945 it was US pressure that led to the creation of the International Military Tribunal which sat at Nuremberg. During the Yalta Conference, Stalin proposed a toast ...”

“... they’d let him get away with it, and, if not, he was at the end of his life anyway. Sebba may be right that his ‘recollections of the Rosenbergs have to be treated with extreme caution’, or at least some scepticism, but in twenty years no one has contradicted the substance of his account, and he often writes against his own interest. He says that ...”

“... lift each other in a tentative balance, was advanced both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened ...”

“... your mobile phone. Before it was assembled in a Chinese factory, the coltan in its capacitors may have been dug by miners in the Eastern Congo, where millions have died in a series of wars over ‘conflict minerals’, though we give this no more thought than previous generations of Westerners gave to the Congolese origins of the ivory in their piano ...”

“... I had to put money on it, I’d say that the odds on quick success in destroying the Iraqi regime may be as high as 5/1 or more, given US military superiority, the vile nature of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the unreliability of Baghdad’s missiles, and the deep divisions in the Arab world. But at first sight, the longer-term gains for the US look pretty ...”

“... was ‘begun, continued, and ended, under a long course of physic, and a great want of money’, may not tell you much worth knowing about the writing itself. Leo Damrosch’s biography from 2013 acknowledges the problem and skirts around those periods of Swift’s life where speculation would have to play a considerable part in filling in the ...”

“... too busy, too grandiose, too much craning your neck. The best way to view a grand painted ceiling may be from a beanbag such as those now placed on the floor of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, into which visitors can sink while gazing up at the enormous panels Rubens painted for Charles I. Hardie shows how these ceiling paintings reworked classical images ...”