“... strangeness, let alone the danger, of the current situation in British politics? One place would be with the three characters at the centre of events. As the tectonic plates of the British state rumble ominously, take a moment to register quite how strange it is that the headlines should be dominated ...”

“... it at all hours.’ ‘You pictured the address numerals of the houses having been painted over by accident again and again, and people not giving their backyard gardens a chance.’ ‘Every afternoon, I walked the girl to the centre of town. There were eight streets that led to it, and for each approach to the two blocks of shops and vaguely ...”

“... unbreakable spirit to win! Fighting the Hun with pepper? Was that something that Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could ...”

“... Powell’s addresses in the Village – there were nine in all – and as I came across them one by one, I began to feel that, even though there was no way of knowing what they had been like when she had lived in them, these dwellings, which ranged from soigné to seedy, were a record of her changing fortunes, testifying to the occasional rewards, but ...”

“... if so, since his great subject is not passing time but missing persons. He has published 22 novels by my count – the blurb on recent reprints rather offhandedly says ‘une vingtaine’ – the last being Inconnues, which came out last year. The titles of the five novels from which I quoted above are: Un cirque passe (1992), Dora Bruder (1997, and now ...”

“... where it isn’t difficult to get live material to start a culture. The notion that you need to be trained in biological warfare to grow it is ludicrous. In principle, any doctor, dentist, vet, microbiology graduate or hospital bacteriology lab technologist could produce it. In Britain, at least 100,000 people have the knowledge, and even if they’ve ...”

“... mountains, or in their decrepit cities crowded with refugees from the 3800 villages destroyed by Saddam Hussein. But their advance south is contested by the Sunni Arabs, everywhere on the retreat but able to stage daily suicide bomb attacks, ambushes and assassinations. On 4 May a man with explosives attached to his ...”

“... a young couple would settle in a separate household near their parents. Marriages tended to be consensual rather than enforced by parental fiat, contracted in the partners’ mid-to-late twenties, and producing five or six children: this was a ‘low pressure’ population system, in which people had a good chance of ...”

“... of the Jews murdered in Europe. This status won international recognition only gradually, thanks by and large to West Germany’s decision not only to pay compensation to the victims of Nazism but also to pay ‘reparations’ to the state of Israel. In her excellent book, Idith Zertal reviews some of the trials of Jewish collaborators who had immigrated to ...”

“... Britain. Porsches, Jaguars and BMWs were the favourite cars on an island that measures nine miles by five. I took a job in a trust and company administration business, where I had to follow instructions faxed daily from banks and law firms across the world. This was a world of smoke and mirrors, in which a Jersey registered company might ...”

“... turn away from dealing with large issues? Mary McCarthy’s 1980 Northcliffe Lectures begin by asking such questions with verve and elegance. Perhaps, she thinks, it is all the fault of the old maestro Henry James. As a critic, and even more as a practitioner, he got the public used to the doctrine of the novel as fine art, ‘a creation beyond ...”

“... fritter stimulates desire to eat it,’ and Harold joking that maybe when he was ninety he would be able to free himself from ‘these fleshly desires’.In the late Cold War, letter-writing provided one of the chinks in the iron curtain. Harold began writing to the Aidovs after seeing the name and address of their daughter in a publication ...”

“... this 0.069 per cent of a day is making to the meaning of her life? C.M. Lucca, the writer created by Catherine Lacey to narrate her fourth novel, Biography of X, at least has the guts to admit the problem. Lucca is also the author of a book called Biography of X, as well as being the widow of the polymathic artist called X (1945-96) who is its subject, a ...”

“... as a second language and became the leading ESL writer of his generation, with a style marked by neologisms (‘smileful’, ‘unsmiled’), off-trail Latinisms (‘fenestral’, ‘penumbral’) and the literal use of words such as ‘febrile’, ‘redolent’ and ‘exude’. His aesthetic – stirring yet amiable, not entirely un-Rushdie-like ...”

“... Lake Wannsee was stunning from the dining room of the villa where the fellows stay, and would only be more beautiful in the spring. ‘As a Jew,’ another fellow replied, ‘I simply can’t look at the view without remembering that this house was occupied by a Nazi who was tried at Nuremburg, or that we’re only a short ...”