“... Book decision even to do this, like walking on a tightrope not between skyscrapers but between the post office and the grocery store. Karl Ove gives us permission to step sideways from our own lives, become larger. I saw Elvis at his desk, writing.When people dislike Knausgaard’s books, there is often a sense of personal insult, as if they were watching him ...”

“... born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, the eighth of eleven children. Her siblings became teachers, post-office clerks, beauticians, farmers, but Hardwick had larger aspirations. ‘How can you be from here and think like you do?’ a fellow Southerner asked. The Kentucky of thoroughbreds and tobacco was not for her: ‘I would have gone to the ends of the ...”

“... detail, the progress of his fatal illness, and then playing the part of the coroner to offer us a post-mortem. Where modern biography is typically reticent about death, Inglis wallows in it, describing Raymond’s physical collapse as though vicariously enjoying the man’s final loss of his virility. At a quarter to nine, pain hit him like a punch. In the ...”

“... commodities broker who said recently at the Euromoney Global Borrowers and Investors Forum: ‘If, post-EU … we come up with a regulatory framework which is cheaper and more competitive, but retains the confidence of the customers, we can actually make London a more competitive marketplace for foreign banks from all over the world.’ The ex-broker was Nigel ...”

“... unable to persuade the tsar that it was a natural revolt against Ottoman misrule, gave up his post and retired to his sister’s estates near Odessa. There he drafted an appeal for European intervention against repression in Greece, which the provisional government in Nafplio sought in vain to present to the Congress of Verona in 1822, the last of the ...”

“... the Dutch European commissioner and his personal assistant.The commissioner with whom he landed a post was Frits Bolkestein. In the Dutch political landscape Bolkestein cut an unusual figure. Son of a president of the court of Amsterdam, after a polymathic education – degrees successively in mathematics, philosophy, Greek, economics (at the LSE) and law ...”

“... you could avoid reading him on a university campus, or continue reading him outside one. In Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Chip Lambert, a former associate professor of literature in his thirties, decides to purge his library of Marxist cultural critics in order to raise some funds with which to indulge the yuppie tastes of his new ...”

“... been a different sort of politician, but that he might not really be a politician at all. When Jonathan Freedland interviewed him recently for the Guardian, he started by asking: ‘Are you a writer who became a politician, rather than a politician who’s done some writing?’ ‘Great question,’ Obama replied.What else might he have been? A law ...”

“... its drop-in stadia, risen overnight from a wilderness of rail tracks and abandoned warehouses. Jonathan Liew, in a World Cup diary for the Observer, wrote about trying to reach a deserted park beside the ‘glittering’ ocean. It was a tempting retreat from the football action. To reach this oasis, he had to fight his way across a six-lane dual ...”

“... remarks that both authors ‘too readily call “German” a general feature of the romantic and post-romantic intellect’, just as he had done himself.The most intense of these speculations concern Mallarmé and Hölderlin, whose question wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit? seems to have haunted de Man: he quarrelled over it with the august interpretations of ...”

“... power; although his victory doesn’t seem to have done much to soften the terrible end of Jonathan Swift, who died demented in 1745, unconsoled by his compatriot’s breakthrough in epistemology. Yeats saw Berkeley’s immaterialism as a return to ancient wisdom, a reinstatement of the proper sovereignty of the imagination, and thus, or so Hill seems ...”

“... across the street, outside the Tory White’s club, two gentlemen have been hanged from a lamp-post by the English armée du people, and one of them is Canning. His face is very small.Only Gillray could have rendered the anti-revolutionary mood with such comprehensive hysterics – the whole crowd of figures suspended between fear and fervour, with ...”

“... the May Day protests was co-ordinated from here,’ said McAlister. ‘There was a police command post linked to Scotland Yard. The anti-war protest was the same. This last year we’ve had more protests than usual – the Countryside Alliance thing. It’s a public safety issue, but there’s always going to be some people out looking for aggro.’ McAlister ...”

“... but there were other children in the block with whom I played in the spaces of the flats. Helen, Jonathan, Susan, whose doors I knocked on, with whom I would have tea sometimes, who, occasionally, would have tea with me in my flat. So, I still dream about getting back to roam in the corridors, to climb the fire escape, to play the games and tell myself the ...”

“... To Cambridge, where I talk to students about my medical history. It’s part of a course run by Jonathan Silverman, director of communications at Addenbrooke’s and himself a Cambridgeshire GP. As so often when I’ve spoken in schools I find I’m of more interest to the staff than I am to the students, and I don’t do it very well, haltingly recounting ...”