“... the arrangements for Mam’s transfer the next day and we say goodnight. ‘Did those questions matter?’ asks Dad. ‘Would they affect the treatment?’ I tell him that I don’t think so and that what Mr Parr was after, presumably, was whether there had been anything similar in the family before. I start the car. ‘Only it was your Grandad Peel. He ...”

“... I never smelt a smelt like that smelt smelt. Leonard (Chico), Adolph (Harpo), Julius (Groucho), Herbert (Zeppo) and Milton (Gummo): Groucho was a middle child, if you want to make anything of it. He was the first to succeed, at the age of 15, with a vestigial talent for singing, but a miasma of rotten luck trailed his early efforts. When he went on the road ...”

“... straight thing was ever made.” ’In 1969, he came upon a piece of moral idiocy from Herbert Marcuse – or at any rate a piece of moral idiocy from Marcuse quoted in Encounter – and went into a towering rage, writing that people like Marcuse and indeed Hannah Arendt were products of:the terrible twisted Mitteleuropa in which nothing is ...”

“... of character, Powell unquestionably ranks far above Proust. How much does such an advantage matter? Novels that scant or defy plot have a long and distinguished history – Sterne in the 18th century, Goncharov in the 19th, Rilke in the early 20th, dozens thereafter. Starting later, effectively in the interwar period, major work dispensing with ...”

“... of authority. When it has been in power, the pattern has always been a diarchy – Brandt and Herbert Wehner, or Schmidt and Brandt – with the Chancellor flanked by a powerful and independent Party Chairman, not to speak of the regional prime ministers. Schröder, catapulted within six months of winning a provincial election in Hanover to leadership of ...”

“... person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in,’ Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, Wright’s favourite novel as a teenager. ‘Dune was really about people,’ Wright told me. ‘It was about the idea that we don’t want to leave things to machines and [should instead] develop as humans. But I see things a little ...”

“... ashore.The landings further radicalised the revolution. Castañeda quotes a wonderful summary from Herbert Marchant, the British Ambassador in Havana, who wrote that Fidel was only able to take his country into the Soviet camp ‘against the wishes and instincts of the majority of the population’ as a result of the April invasion, ‘which made the Suez ...”