“... to apply a spark … to set off the revolutionary explosion’. This spark would be the foco, a small guerrilla vanguard whose purpose was to launch armed struggle in the countryside, just as it had in Cuba, creating the necessary ‘subjective conditions’ – an awareness among the people that they could and should fight. Castro wanted the armed struggle ...”

“... not occurred, the dinosaurs might still be here. Under the influence of palaeontologists such as Stephen Jay Gould, the notion of progressive evolution has given way to a more makeshift world view, in which circumstances play as great a part as natural selection in shaping the history of life. In this view, chance happenings and sudden disasters may have ...”

“... history, of the novels and poems of the Thirties, is of the same kind. He has a strong feeling for Stephen Haggard’s novel Nya, which he happened to find a copy of during the war, and which he feels to be a forerunner of Lolita, giving sound professional reasons why Lolita won out and Nya vanished into limbo. What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is ...”

“... Pope’s tour: the evidence it provided of the decline of anti-Catholic sentiment in England. The small demonstrations, the placard-waving, were mere twitches from a diminishing vestige of public opinion compared with the paroxysm of bigotry that attended the so-called ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850-51, when Pius IX had the effrontery to set up a Catholic ...”

“... Lewis, Picasso and Gauguin. Music by Goosens and Stravinsky. Books by Wyndham Lewis, Proust, Stephen Hudson, T. S. Eliot, Osbert Sitwell and Zola.’ But she still couldn’t quite make the last act long enough, and when she died in 1933 she left The Triflers incomplete. I was nine years old at the time, and was not immediately told of her death. I ...”

“... Retreat for Penitent Prostitutes), or to be protected by a patron, like Tom Jones the foundling or Stephen Duck the thresher poet, fared well. Foundling Hospital infants were especially favoured. They benefited from the mercantilist desire to make everyone useful; from polite society’s new fascination with the child as plaything; from the Enlightenment ...”

“... title was La Historia de Mayta, but Vargas Llosa’s translator – not named, which is bad, but a small kindness in this instance, for he or she has done a sadly casual job – has quite thrown away the duplicity of that wording, with the crassly unduplicitous ‘real life of ...’ Vargas Llosa’s question is: is this the history of Mayta, or is it just a ...”

“... purpose; but once sea-bathing, seaside holidays, Romanticism and sailing for pleasure, usually in small boats, were firmly established, a great wealth or at least a great quantity of writing became available for the anthologist. Not much of it, however, was of the pure, solely marine nature that the editor had thought of in the first place, nor was much of it ...”

“... the sad and a PR guru. There was Bach for Larkin and a bit of Bix Beiderbecke. Ten years later, at Stephen Spender’s wingding in St Martin-in-the-Fields, there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon ...”

“... of most American scholarship and reporting on Russia. With a few exceptions – such as NYU’s Stephen Cohen and Pittsburgh’s Sean Guillory – even simple self-criticism is almost entirely absent from US Slavic Studies departments. Politically, nearly all the major scholarship of the past half century (some of it very good or even brilliant in terms of ...”

“... The issue​ of evolutionary inevitability was brought sharply into focus by the late Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life (1989). Gould discussed the bizarre fossils uncovered by the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris in an outcrop of rock in the Canadian Rockies, known as the Burgess Shale. The shale was formed 511 million years ago, in the period when animal life was first emerging ...”

“... took pride in having killed more than half a million animals, including the 2150 pieces of small game he bagged in one day and the 3000th stag he shot shortly before Gavrilo Princip shot him. Through the centuries, in Britain and across Europe, cats had the hardest time of all, hurled from high towers, skinned alive, persecuted with the witches they ...”

“... the governments of Wilson and Thatcher, the titans of British political history emerge as pretty small beer. Such a change in popular expectations did not of course occur overnight, and there was a long-drawn-out period in which both political cultures co-existed with and rivalled each other. From the 1880s onwards the careers of nearly all major politicians ...”

“... it’s clear that the result of electricity privatisation was to take power away from the people. Small British shareholders have no influence over the overwhelmingly non-British owners of the firms that generate and distribute power in Britain. The fact that individual households and small businesses can choose to switch ...”

“... as ‘an occupied city’. It is hard not to feel that it was occupied by Leopold and Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan and others too numerous to mention. Later, he writes: ‘After all, one of the first policies formulated by the Norman occupiers was to erase Gaelic culture.’ Once again, there is no footnote, no explanation. A few hundred pages ...”