“... reporter, a man who admires her in spite of her wealth and manners, not because of them. She may even have slept with him, for all she can remember, and her prospective second husband believes she has. The reporter says not, because there are rules about taking advantage of girls who have had too much champagne. He’s not a toff but he is a gent. It’s ...”

“... your hand along the spines of the books, concentrating on the question you want an answer to. You may feel a tug, a certain book demanding attention; you may feel that this is mere frivolity, that any selection will be random. Either way, your fingers will linger on a book. The important thing at this stage is to know, with ...”

“... since the same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa. Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves protesting and ...”

“... far from the unquestioning pastoral many reviewers took it to be, although part of its popularity may derive from this misreading. The novel is deeply pessimistic about the capacity of pastoral to tell truthful stories about the landscape. A period of forgetting – when the old shape of the village fades under the pressure of enclosures and mechanisation ...”

“... for a genius to be a genius, he must have a selfless slave between him and the world so that he may select what tidbits he chooses from it and not have his brains swallowed up in chaff. For women this protection is impossible.’ Well, Lenny Bruce had as good a claim to the title of Jewish intellectual as many of those in these pages, and he phrased it just ...”

“... or the real home of the imaginary Leopold Bloom, it’s like stumbling into a fiction you feel you may not be able to get out of. ‘Argentinians don’t believe in circumstances,’ Borges once wrote. The context is a rather flimsy essay called ‘Our Poor Individualism’, in which he argues for a form of nationalism which refuses the nation in its ...”

“... culture eleven thousand years ago. The Clovis tribes were hunters of such efficiency that they may have exterminated the mammoth, the mastodon and the giant sloth, and several dozen other species besides. Mankind evidently had blood on its hands from the first. Mithen takes us to Australia, to wonder at the adaptability of its early inhabitants in the face ...”

“... in his award-winning 1974 study, to be the one volume of the novel that a time-pressed reader may safely and entirely skip.8. The problems of Albertine are(from the narrator’s point of view)a) lyingb) lesbianism,and (from Albertine’s point of view)a) being imprisoned in the narrator’s house.9. Her bad taste in music, although several times remarked ...”

“... a reclusive billionaire called Pete Mercer, who suggests to O’Rourke that Israel and the Ulms may have ‘arranged an irredentism pact’: ‘What is an irredentism pact?’ ‘The return of land to those to whom it rightfully belongs.’ ‘They have a claim to the land?’ ‘As the first victims of genocide,’ he said. I was reminded of my ...”

“... that is not self-protective and self-regarding. The sentences I have already quoted from the book may begin to give an idea of how fierce this attack and this regret can be. There is a clue to this development in a magnificent piece in Pulse called ‘Marriage Lines’ – though I confess the clue was easier to see because I read the novel before I read the ...”

“... Roman state had no interest in education as a means of moral or societal improvement. The Romans may have been, as Bloomer’s subtitle suggests, the originators of ‘liberal education’, but nothing here points to liberalism in the modern sense. Liberalis meant ‘free’ not as in ‘freethinking’, but as in ‘non-slave’. For the liberales of ...”

“... first things we should understand about grief is its banality, its need of ordinary old words that may seem flat but will not seem evasive. ‘The griefstruck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically … sad.’ Even so, a writer has to do more than glumly name this sadness, and if not evasion, then a certain obliquity is essential to ...”

“... Anywhere between two and twenty minutes before delivery of a statement the interpreter may – but also may not – receive the speaker’s text in the original language, sometimes accompanied by an English translation, known as a ‘Van Doren’, after Charles Van Doren, a teacher of English at Columbia who was ...”

“... pleasure of spotting the ghosts of once famous musicians flitting through the pages. Others may admire the young man’s assumption that conventional middle-class manners and pleasures are compatible with an uninterrupted dedication to the craft of music. Andrew Motion has said that what he wants from a biography is information about commonplace ...”

“... Thucydides​ may well have been the first Western author to address himself to posterity. His forerunners – Homer and Herodotus, principally – show no awareness of a readership extending beyond their own time. But Thucydides called his work ‘a possession for eternity’, and spoke of the chaos of civil war as something ‘that is and always will be, as long as human nature remains the same ...”