“... wit, and already knowing everything there was to be known about films and quite definitely a man of the world.18 July. Not having a mortgage or being otherwise in hock to the bank I am not particularly perturbed when the governor of the Bank of England predicts a likely rise in the interest rate. What does bother me is that for no obvious reason that ...”

“... behind the familiar mild exterior. Nobody would impute any lack of psychic integrity in the man himself. True enough, he was a peculiarly self-contained person whose inner life was always opaque, even to his most intimate companions. But there was no harsh discontinuity or irreconcilable inconsistency in his temperament, and we have no reason to suppose ...”

“... on his arrival in Delhi in 1334, Ibn Battutah was given a mansion in the old quarter of Kila Ray Pithora, 2000 silver dinars as sarshushti (‘for washing his head’), an annual stipend of 5000 silver dinars, a robe of fine goathair, and ‘a thousand Indian pounds of flour, a thousand pounds of flesh-meat, and I cannot say how many pounds of ...”

“... an important problem and to become apprenticed to a senior scientist. I was lucky as a young man to find both. The biochemist husband of a cousin of mine tipped me off about the importance of haemoglobin, the protein of the red blood cells, and I found a scientific father in the physicist W.L. Bragg, who taught me a lot and vouchsafed his great name to ...”

“... of his deserts, absence of office, worries him, still. He is still seeking to be the ‘great man’ whom he is now and then able to impersonate in public – as once at a royal levee, resplendent ‘in a suit of imperial blue, lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons’. What energy he had, what persistence, what ...”

“... He has that in common with his patient Mr Thompson, one of two Korsakov amnesiacs described in The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, who, says Sacks, ‘must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him’. Mr Thompson invents ...”

“... about identifying two of the men involved, who are now dead (I am about to do so), but the man described in my book as the ‘young planter’ is still alive, and I will not name him. Within four hours of the explosions on 21 November five Irishmen – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker – were arrested at ...”

“... Austerlitz and in a state of huge, irrecoverable elation saw the evening star set ‘over the poor man’s cottage’. It’s a Wordsworthian spot of time, a historical moment in the prose Prelude which Hazlitt’s readers assemble from his collected works. Out of piety and curiosity I wanted to see where it happened and to walk the road to Shrewsbury, where ...”

“... later we pulled up to A&E at Charing Cross. ‘I can’t sit down,’ Jason whispered, as a man abandoned his ambulance with its doors open and ran to bring him a wheelchair. There were no stretchers to be had, so we had to fold him down into it. His eyes, tracking back and forth, seemed to be seeing something else, terrible and horizontal: a red steppe ...”

“... forget how creepy it is for a 14-year-old girl to be singing a love letter to a moustachioed man more than twice her age.Apparently, Gable was so moved by her performance that he kissed her, at which Garland burst into tears (Mickey Rooney, her teenage co-star and classmate in the schoolroom on the MGM lot, joked that it was probably Gable’s bad breath ...”

“... his own reflection in a mirror – looking like a crayon portrait of the Don, ‘a lean, harrowed man, no longer young, not yet decrepit, his eyes a little agonised by some misty private vision, blind to the facts of life around’. He presents himself as a man travelling because he finds himself more acceptable among ...”

“... an absolute standard of poverty, and if so, what is it? Or is it all relative, since the poor man only feels deprived when at the gate of the rich man’s castle? What is the difference between the deserving and the undeserving poor, between those who labour but earn insufficient reward, and those who are impoverished ...”

“... companions on the Beagle,’ writes Ronald Clark, ‘soon ceased to wonder at the young man who caught 68 species of beetle in a single day and shot 80 species of birds in a morning’s walk.’ It was the daily drudgery – the describing, packing, numbering and shipping of skins, bottles and bones to Cambridge – that shows the real extent of his ...”

“... layoffs. The company never quite folded, and was sold to a venture capital firm in 2007. The man who hired me, one of the ‘founders’ – what is it about starting a website that makes people think they have a lot in common with George Washington? – is now a not very funny comic wine columnist. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge is a period novel ...”

“... and Steve Baker, have military backgrounds. As with the Second World War, Brexit will perform an X-ray of our collective moral fibre. Remainers love facts, but are afraid of the truth. This is, I suspect, as close to a Conservative ideology of Brexit as exists. At the very least, it has some internal coherence, whatever it may lack in detail regarding the ...”