“... been excavated. It’s a mistake. Walking through these tall narrow chambers, none with natural light and few with more than the faintest fresco, I feel it’s no more inspiring than a tour round a 19th-century municipal gasworks, which it undoubtedly resembles. Most of the party wear headphones and follow the cassette guide and so become dull and bovine in ...”

“... Burglary in Pangbourne I attended once where they done it halfway up the wall in an 18th-century light fitting. Any other sphere and they’d have got the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.’ ‘You’ve perhaps not noticed,’ Mr Ransome said grimly, ‘but we don’t have any light fittings.’ ‘Another one in Guildford did ...”

“... In the early years of his rule, Alawite villages were transformed: oil lamps gave way to electric light; dirt tracks became paved roads. Buses began to reach isolated mountain villages – buses that soon carried sons into the military, intelligence services and state bureaucracy. The geography of Syria shifted, as coastal towns like Jableh – once dominated ...”

“... and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could. In the theatre: ‘the escape from life, the oblivion of ...”

“... performance by restricting its size, as if I was Peter Brook called on to direct Orson Welles or Donald Wolfit (if anyone remembers that name). The obvious priority was getting rid of any possibility of an audience. If it was just the two of us there would be more prospect of damping down his reactions. There was a less selfish aspect too: Dad wouldn’t ...”

“... heyday and personalities of modernism. He wrote little (‘The mason stirs:/words!/Pens are too light./Take a chisel to write’), but what he wrote ever more powerfully endures. Reading him now, there is an overpowering drench of the 1920s and 1930s, and a suggestion of how the style of progressive verse might have gone on, if Pound hadn’t disappeared ...”

“... the bible of anti-Semites everywhere. One of Zubeidat’s home care clients, a loose screw called Donald Larking, passed along conspiracist libertarian newspapers and magazines. The internet provided even more enticing forms of inflammatory propaganda – lectures by the al-Qaida recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki and the like – and the opportunity to share ...”

“... death she suppressed many of his letters, in order to present herself in a more positive light, and told false stories about their life together. (‘The silence of the famous dead,’ as Janet Malcolm put it, ‘offers an enormous temptation to the self-promoting living.’) Alma even interfered with Mahler’s compositions, demanding – based on ...”

“... about cutting benefits for Poles and Hungarians working in Britain.’ The UK was once a shining light in Europe; it was the Tories under Thatcher in particular who pressed for democracy in Eastern Europe. No more. It is striking​ how little attention has been paid to the Brexit debate in the rest of Europe. European leaders were willing to engage in ...”

“... In​ August and September 1990, Richard Sale, a lieutenant colonel from the Light Infantry regiment of the British army, toured the UK and West Germany – then just months away from reunification – with a primitive Zenith Supersport laptop. Sale had commanded a company, some 120 men, in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s and later a battalion of 650 ...”

“... intricate things around. Which, of course, they often are: what need is there, he asks, for Donald Judd when there’s the Isle of Grain? There are gleefully lowbrow jokes and visual gags too, often at Meades’s expense. Much of Museum without Walls, which is organised into sections on place, memory, blandness, ‘edgelands’ and urban ...”

“... knows? Blue Nights is dedicated to Quintana. The reference in the title is to a colour of evening light – ‘the French called this time of day “l’heure bleue”.’ You see it first in late April when ‘suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise,’ but only in certain latitudes: in New York, for example, where Didion now lives, but not ...”

“... files. But a lot of water will flow under the bridges of the Moskva before Sorge’s file comes to light … Even if the Nazis find out sooner than we expect, what’s to keep a man who was a communist 15 years ago from changing his political opinion?Then he turned to an assistant: ‘Arrange to have him hired as the Tokyo correspondent of the Frankfurter ...”

“... concentrating instead on trying to capture the al-Qaida leadership. This was never considered. As Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, said in December 2001, ‘If you walked in and said “Here is Mr bin Laden” the problem would not go away.’ The invasion was ineffective in targeting al-Qaida’s leaders, who largely survived it and evaded ...”

“... a kind of brand-name or designer label, which could be attached to gallery art, film, rock music, light shows and books, eventually extending the ‘franchise’ to include magazines, Polaroid photographs, TV talk shows and other appearances. In his Dazed and Confused interview, Damien Hirst talks about his interest in designing billboards and his interviewer ...”