“... the one with the handbag, the one with the cowboy hat, and then their grey successors. We were so happy when those fresh-faced challengers, the Blair/Brown and Clinton/Gore double acts, showed them the door. People smarter than I was probably foresaw the compromises that would follow, but I doubt any of us fully ...”

“... of Idi Amin, who had seized the presidency in a coup the previous year. The expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population, estimated at seventy thousand, was announced in August; we were given three months to leave. Around twenty thousand had Ugandan citizenship. Roughly the same number had applied for citizenship, but their applications remained unprocessed – a ...”

“... helicopters. We could drive there in forty minutes, but travel by road is far too dangerous. So we just wait, and spend the day trying to avoid the heat, which is impossible because the air-conditioning in the tent doesn’t work. One Naafi serves the entire base, with a dry bar and a small supermarket. But the generator can only power half the building ...”

“... in dispute. These post-colonial specks in the South Atlantic were, supremely, a diplomat’s preoccupation. Yet not the smallest virtue of Mr Charlton’s important book is the evidence it summons up which shows that the Palliser thesis is only half-right. For decades, the people may have been ignorant, but the ...”

“... designed, bound and typeset by its publishers – represents the merest sliver of Mavis Gallant’s lifelong achievement. Even discounting the two novels and the books of essays, what we have here can amount to little more than half the content of her nine published short-story collections. Gallant has made the selection herself, rejecting ‘straight humour ...”

“... by only a year, one of them in the exhibition of his photographs of the Crimean War at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh (until 26 November) and the other not. The first, from 1854, seems conventional: we see a Victorian gentleman – hair parted, beard trimmed to cover only the underside of his face, leaving the strong chin to fight its own battles ...”

“... little public client and university appendage. As someone noted, a little gnomically (but it’s the truth), ‘Beckmann was time.’ He was successful early, painting John Martin-like catastrophes on a huge scale: visionary, awful, sandy things. The first monograph on him appeared before the First World War, when he was still in his twenties. In the ...”

“... because of a hope that Trump would nominate justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the court’s decision guaranteeing (at least in theory) women’s right to abortion.The gambit paid off. Trump filled Scalia’s seat with Justice Neil Gorsuch. Soon after, Justice Anthony Kennedy ...”

“... he called his ‘pet lamb’ – as her excuse for favouring my sister, saying that my father had so totally appropriated me, their first-born, with his adoration that, when they had a second child, she had no alternative to loving her more than he did and more than she did me. She was so blithely innocent about normal ...”

“... first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write. ...”

“... too many times. That meant I would have to take the ferry, across the neck of one of the world’s largest natural harbours. After a jolting truck ride, I found myself at the edge of a concrete pier, watching the sun-set through the haze, waiting for the boat. Fishermen poled their pirogues onto the brown strip of beach. A ...”

“... nuns. It was a Time-Life edition with an embroidered cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, a cover so beautiful it stayed on the eye and swam over the yellowing pages. I read it till the spine cracked and never returned it; it is next to me right now. I only stole the books that baffled me, the ones I couldn’t seem to solve. She was born Lula Carson Smith in ...”

“... of the population had read at least one of the Astérix books; and by the time of Goscinny’s death total sales in France are said to have amounted to more than 55 million copies, putting Astérix substantially ahead of his main (Belgian) rival, Tintin. The first French space satellite, launched in 1965, was named in his honour (the US later matched ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... it was assembled … Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light.’ Behold, Werner’s sacramental tone urges, a saint’s relic, a fragment blessed with mystic powers, miraculously rising from the sacred site of the archive. The complex nature of this archive was well captured in 1945 by Millicent Todd Bingham ...”